Biutiful Movie Review

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s fourth feature film, Biutiful, is a structural, though not a thematic, departure from his earlier films. In drafting a story (with a screenplay co-written by Armando Bo and Nicolás Giacobone) centered on one main character in a single city, he has wisely eschewed the thematically heavy convention of interconnecting stories that have a common focal point. As much as I admire his other films, there is artificiality in the way he tries to illustrate the ways in which all humanity are inextricably tied to one another. With Babel it became a bit too preachy for my taste.

However, in Biutiful he presents a portrait of a man, Uxbal (played by Javier Bardem in one of his best performances) – a father, husband, underworld criminal and spiritual visionary – who learns he’s dying of cancer. Everything in his life is called into question as he has only a matter of weeks or months to reconcile his morality and life to find inner peace.

Mother and Child Movie Review

The Colombian director Rodrigo García is something of an Alejandro González Iñárritu-light. Not in the sense that his films are worse than Iñárritu’s, but because they utilize a similar approach to interconnected narrative threads without the same gravity. It should come as no surprise then that Iñárritu served as executive producer on García’s Nine Lives and his most recent film (and subject of this review) Mother and Child about the realities of adoption and the consequences imparted on all parties involved.

Three women figure in three stories joined thematically. Annette Bening is Karen, a middle-aged woman so fixated on the daughter she gave up for adoption after becoming pregnant at fourteen that she has never allowed anyone to get close enough to have a meaningful relationship. She is full of regret and there’s an unspoken animosity toward her elderly dying mother who, the movie makes implicit, forced her into her decision. Naomi Watts is Elizabeth, the now grown daughter Karen gave up 37 years earlier. Karen is a career lawyer, working her way up the ladder hoping for a future Appellate Court appointment. She keeps nothing to tie her down to one place, no lasting relationship, adopted parents gone. Kerry Washington is Lucy. She is unable to bear her own children so she and husband Joseph (David Ramsay) have decided to adopt.