Biutiful – review

A surface tension of liquid misery is stretched over this movie, like unshed tears on a brimming eyeball. Everyone and everything in it seems suspended in a warm ocean of unhappiness. Biutiful is sometimes beautiful, and sometimes exasperating, questionable and absurd. Its attempt at a globalist, humanist aesthetic of compassion looks from certain angles thrillingly ambitious – and from others dreamy and self-congratulatory, like a Benetton ad from the 1990s, and verging on misery porn-chic. The swooning praise it's been getting from some quarters is odd. But there is no doubt about it – Biutiful is impressive film-making. Whether or not we want to receive it, the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu offers his audience an entire created world, personal and distinctive, and Biutiful is his most accomplished picture so far.

Javier Bardem gives an overpowering and now Oscar-nominated performance as the anguished street hustler Uxbal, who finds himself bowed down by troubles. It is his presence, and that great face of his, looming hugely and handsomely into the camera, that carries the movie – that, and some inspired flashes of visual poetry, chiefly a brilliantly conceived meeting between Uxbal and his late father.

He is a fortysomething guy in Barcelona whose life is coming, or has come, to pieces: he is estranged from his wife who has alcohol issues and bipolar disorder, and the responsibility for looking after their two young children rests largely with him. He has had some terrible news from the doctor, and his business too is unravelling – by bribing cops, he runs a string of Senegalese illegals who sell drugs on the street and he has connections with a couple of gay Chinese gangmasters who have a squalid basement full of terrified immigrants. Through his brother, a crooked contractor, Uxbal hopes to get these poor souls work on a building site in return for a massive upfront cut from their pay.

On top of all this, Uxbal has another burden – the burden of second sight. He can, in M Night Shyamalan's immortal phrase, see dead people. He has been schooled in this by a wise old woman, in whose arms he is later to be seen sobbing; he feels constrained to attend funerals and pass on any messages to grieving relatives.

So Uxbal is a nasty piece of work by any yardstick, surely, a guy who makes his money exploiting poor people, and yet repeatedly we are invited to sympathise with him, and see these incriminating details as flaws in a vulnerable, streetwise character, to focus on his redemptive trials and on his muddled attempts to do good things for the immigrants he leeches off.

Uxbal's life reaches a crisis with a shocking and horrifying event, for which he is at least partly responsible, although it arises from his well-intentioned effort to do some good. He cries to his spiritual confidante: "I don't know if I should turn myself in!" My own response to this leniently conceived dilemma is: erm, yes, Uxbal, you should turn yourself in, and all your accomplices, too. But Uxbal does not do this, and is told merely to make some kind of spiritual amends to the dead, which is frankly getting off pretty lightly. No one in the movie is apprehended by the law, and the only cops visible are corrupt ones. Only a kind of ambiguous poetic justice appears to be visited on those responsible.

In a movie of less self-confidence, less rhapsodic euphoria, these notes of evasion and self-pity would be unbearable, and they come close to being unbearable as it is. But the sheer tidal force of the film sweeps it along, and it is speckled with moments of poetry and unarguable brilliance. One of Uxbal's cash opportunities comes from the fact that a shopping mall is to be built on the site of his father's grave: his father's body will be removed and Uxbal and his brother will receive a handsome cash compensation from the property firm involved. It is only once the body has been exhumed that his sons are informed that it has been embalmed, and that if they wish to, they may now see their dead father preserved at the point of death, as a boy of 20 years old. It is a scary, eerie, amazingly unexpected moment: a real coup.

Iñárritu also does impressive work in conveying the densely populated loneliness of the city – Barcelona is here very far from the picture-perfect tourist destination – and seems to intuit its ghosts and lost souls flocking in the skies overhead, like birds. These images are similar to those that recur in his 2003 movie 21 Grams.

This is a director who has, in recent years, verged on self-parody with his glib internationalism and his repeated device of hooking disparate lives together with a random event. Biutiful is an advance on this, and the fluency and confidence of Iñárritu's cinematic language are really spectacular. It may not convert, or convince, but it is certainly arresting: not magic realism exactly, but rather the director's very own brand of magic naturalism.