"Biutiful"

2010, directed by Alejandro Inarritu

Possibly the most honest film you'll ever see. It's taken me almost a week to feel that i can begin to communicate anything about it in words. Several of my normal response parameters don't apply. You won't hear me mention a single actor by name, though they were perfect. You won't hear me compare it to anything else. I'm sorry that it got involved with the "movie awards" scene, it's undeserving of such trite nonsense. Inarritu also wrote the screenplay, along with Armando Bo and Nicolas Giacobone. There is a genre called theater of cruelty, in which the point is to try to make the audience feel uncomfortable or assaulted. This film is a thousand times crueler than any product of that genre, because it intends no cruelty at all. It is an unrelenting, stunningly painful portrayal of present-day human society on planet earth. Yet at the same time, it is profoundly gentle, almost muted. With almost none of the contrived drama of conventional cinema, it removes itself from the emotional manipulation inherent therein. There was only one scene that i saw coming (that's me...perhaps you'll see no scene coming, or seventeen). Although there is one "biutiful" actor in the cast, to remind us that such people exist, there is none of the artificial feel associated with watching actors who are more attractive than the real people they portray. That pretense is gone, leaving you with one less slice of bullshit in your psyche. Some of the film's uniqueness can be attributed to the fact that it's European...but only some. With conventional cinematic nonsense stripped away, you're left with people who are no more or less real than you and everyone you know. Watching the pain of their lives is chokingly, indelibly hard to endure. Welcome to your world.