When film director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu told an
interviewer that his most recent film, Biutiful,
was his “first complete tragedy,” it almost sounded like
a perverse joke. This is, after all, the man whose
films, Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and
Babel, are said to comprise his “death trilogy.” His
films thus far have been populated by tragic characters
burdened with guilt, rage, and sorrow. In Babel,
Cate Blanchett’s tourist takes a bullet to the head
shortly after the opening titles, and in 21 Grams,
Sean Penn’s college professor requires a heart
transplant and, before the final reel, is toting a gun
at the head of Benicio Del Toro who has plenty of
problems of his own. Despite the downbeat tone of his
films, Inarritu insists “I am not a depressive person at
all,” but as he told UK’s The Telegraph, “I
reflect a lot on my life and life in general from the
perspective of death.”
The
reflections began not long after Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu was
born in Mexico City on August 16, 1963. He grew up in the middle
class neighborhood of La Colonia Narvarte where his father was a
banker. But the bank went bust, and his father, possessing what
Alejandro calls “the virtue of a warrior,” struggled to support
his family, starting a business buying and selling fruits and
vegetables to restaurants. Alejandro was often awakened in the
night by the sound of his father coughing, and it filled him
with terror. “For the first time I realized that someone could
die, he said, and this sensitivity was strengthened through
reading the works of Herman Hesse and Albert Camus. As a
teenager, he traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, scrubbing the
floors and greasing the engines of a cargo boat.
Back home in
Mexico, he enrolled in a university to study film, while also
working as a disc jockey at Mexico City’s most popular radio
station. “That was my training as a storyteller. You create
stories with music, you create soundtracks for the lives of the
people in the city - four million listeners every day.” His
studies eventually opened the door to directing television
commercials. “I saw those as rehearsals for a feature film,” he
told the BBC. “I read lots of scripts and got myself introduced
to (writer) Guillermo Arriaga.” Together, they envisioned a
series of short films that would portray different aspects of
life in Mexico City. “We wrote 36 drafts, each one on a
typewriter. It took three years.” Eventually, they settled on
the three stories that became Amores Perros (translation:
Love’s a Bitch).
The film’s
characters hail from different socio-economic backgrounds, and
include a wealthy TV producer and a homeless man, all of them
brought together through a car accident in Mexico City. The
overriding theme is loyalty, and dogs (man’s best friend) are an
integral part of each of the characters’ lives.
Although
violent, and heavily criticized by animal rights groups for
scenes set in the vicious dog fighting underworld, Gonzalez
Inarritu insisted he did not use violence gratuitously. “When
you live in a city, as I do, where violence is really in the
streets and people die every day, there’s nothing funny about
it. We try to show that violence has a consequence - when you
create violence, it turns against you.”
A hit at the
2000 Cannes Film Festival, Amores Perros went on to an
Oscar nomination as best foreign language film, and laudatory
notices from The New York Times where Elvis Mitchell said it
“feels like the first classic of the new decade, with sequences
that will probably make their way into history. . . In his very
first film, Mr. Gonzalez Inarritu makes the kind of journey some
directors don’t, or can’t travel in an entire career.”
He followed
that triumph by joining Wim Wenders, Sean Penn and nine other
filmmakers in contributing a short (11 minutes each) segment to
the 2002 film, September 11 which dramatized the events
of that shocking day. In his review, Roger Ebert singled out
Gonzalez Inarritu’s “Mexico” as “the best of the segments,”
notable for the way the screen remains dark for most of its
running time, “occasionally interrupting it with flashes of
bodies falling from the burning World Trade Center.”
The success of
these projects made Hollywood take notice, and Inarritu made
21 Grams in English with financial backing from Focus
Features. Once again, the lives of people from strikingly
diverse backgrounds converge as the result of a tragic accident.
Sean Penn plays a mathematics professor in need of a heart
transplant who becomes romantically involved with the widow of
the donor. Benicio Del Toro is an ex-con, a reformed junky and
alcoholic, who has turned to Jesus to straighten out his life.
“Stealing ain’t worth it,” he advises a teenage troublemaker.
“Going to church, reading the Bible, and believing in Jesus,
brother, that’s your ticket.” And that’s only skimming the
surface. Del Toro and Naomi Watts earned Oscar nominations for
their work, and the film proved both a critical and commercial
success that paved the way for Gonzalez Inarritu’s most
ambitious project to date.
Babel
came about after Gonzalez Inarritu moved to the United States,
where he was driven after his increasing fame made him and his
family a target for criminals in his homeland. “At that time in
Mexico, kidnapping was kind of a sport,” he said.
Once again
working with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, they concocted a
plot in which the storylines converge, turning the lives of the
characters upside down.
“I was full of
these ideas in my heart and in my brain about what is happening
in the world,” he said, “how we have been transforming the
reality of people who live very far away and how these people
can be affected by a decision that is made by a guy in New York,
for instance. One decision can end up being a tragedy in the
life of a poor community 10,000 miles away.”
As he did in
21 Grams, Gonzalez Inarritu juggled multiple storylines,
but this time on a much wider canvas, jumping from the United
States to Morocco, Japan, and Mexico with dialogue in five
languages. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett claimed top billing as
an American couple whose vacation in Morocco is shattered when
she is shot in the head by a boy whose rifle was a gift from a
Japanese businessman. The story is enormously complex, and makes
the point that communication is the key to understanding.
Pitt and
Blanchett, as well as Japan’s Rinko Kikuchi who plays a sexually
promiscuous deaf mute, were professional actors, but the
majority of the cast had no previous acting experience.
“It was a very
difficult task,” Inarritu said of directing non-actors. “But it
is the most rewarding experience that I have had.” The amateur
cast was not intimidated by the presence of big stars like Pitt
and Blanchett “because they didn’t know them. They were not
affected by this pop culture that we have or these cults of
personalities.”
In choosing
his actors, the director “wanted to see in their eyes something
that was close to what the character should be. I think that in
the eyes you can read the interior life of a person. And I
thought, have they got an interior life? Some emotional baggage
that they can find themself to play what the character needs?
All these people were what they are.”
Babel
was nominated for seven Oscars, including nods for best picture
and best director, but it proved to be a very contentious movie,
starting at the Cannes Film Festival where it divided the
audience into two camps: those who loved it and felt it
deserving of the Palme d’Or (which it failed to win), and those
who felt it was too manipulative, too reliant on contrived
coincidences, to be effective. For Time’s Richard Corliss,
his “overriding feeling during the movie was one of
exasperation.” It was all too much for David Edelstein, the
New York magazine critic who, reviewing the film for NPR,
said, “I finally detached myself from Babel. Who wants to
surrender to scrambled, in-your-face storytelling when you can’t
for a second trust the storytellers?” Roger Ebert, on the other
hand, believed that “Babel finds Inarritu in full command
of his technique. . . the film builds to a stunning impact
because it does not hammer us with heroes and villains but asks
us to empathize with all of its characters.”
While the film
proposed that many of the world’s ills is due to a lack of
communication, too much communication may have fractured
Inarritu’s partnership with writer Guillermo Arriaga. After
Arriaga told the press that he was as much the “auteur” of the
three films he wrote for Inarritu as Gonzalez Inarritu himself,
and responsible for “95 percent of the structure of 21 Grams,”
the director was incensed and banned the writer from the
Babel screening at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.
Having
completed the films that he considered a trilogy, Gonzalez
Inarritu felt it was time to move away from multiple storylines.
“After Babel, I felt that I was getting into a
predictable route. I didn’t want to be branded as the
multi-linear guy. So I deliberately wanted to explore a
straight, linear narrative.”
The
inspiration for Biutiful came to him after “I had
listened to Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major and that had given
me an idea for a tone and a mood.” In the film, Javier Bardem is
a small-time hood overseeing a sweat shop populated by illegal
immigrants from Africa and China. His wife is bipolar and having
sex with his brother. Diagnosed with cancer, he tries
reconnecting with his estranged children.
The director
doesn’t deny that it’s a grim film. “If we want to reduce the
film to a word or to an adjective, yes, people have used ‘dark’
or ‘bleak’,” Inarritu told NPR. “This is a tragedy which is a
genre that has been forgotten in the entertainment business, and
is a great valuable way to express a story of human beings.” In
Biutiful, Javier Bardem’s character is “somebody who will
be hit by destiny in every angle, and while he’s falling, how
this character with dignity will find a way to redeem himself.”
For Bardem,
his role as Uxbal is appealing because “I believe in
contradiction. I believe that the world is not black-and-white,
and that is why I like to portray characters like this. There’s
a human being there going through a lot of conflicts and
contradictions and is not easy to read in the first moment. But
as we go along in the movie, we understand better who he is and
we care for him.”
Barcelona is
far less sunny in Biutifil than it was in Woody Allen’s
Vicky Christina Barcelona in which Bardem played an
artist. “It was just that I discovered that part of Barcelona,”
the director said. “It has these hidden, dark places. I think
all of Europe has been struck by immigration, and it’s getting
really, really tough.”
Gonzalez
Inarritu believes that art should “provoke, create catharsis.”
As for Biutiful, “You might like it, or you might not
like it, but nobody will be indifferent.” Recalling a French
critic who saw the film twice at Cannes, disliking it the first
time and admiring it on the second viewing, the director said,
“In a way, I think it is a film that needs to be seen two times.
It’s like when something very emotional happens - you see it one
way, how you acted, how you thought, but when time passes, you
take out the emotionality of it. It takes on another meaning.”
Biutiful
certainly provoked. While praising Bardem as “always
persuasive,” Mark Jenkins of NPR found the film “contrived,
bombastic and lacking a sense of proportion.” Roger Ebert was
admiring. “Gonzalez Inarritu follows Uxbal’s last days with
great intimacy, burying his camera in the seamy street life that
Uxbal lives, introducing many characters in sharp and colorful
relief.”
Biutiful
earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film and Bardem
picked up a nod as best actor.
Responding to
the charge that his films are bleak, depressing affairs in which
death hovers above the proceedings like an ominous cloud,
Inarritu told NPR that “I found much more darkness and bleakness
in a 30 minute TV newscast, and in films where people are killed
and you feel nothing, and when they kill people in a very cool
way, very well shot, you laugh and you don’t care.” In his
films, you care, and no matter how tragic the lives depicted,
they ultimately celebrate life.
“You can
better embrace life, you can enjoy it more, when you are
conscious that it will end. You bite life.” He has talked of
possibly attempting comedy at some point, and offered a preview
of sorts with a Nike commercial he directed for the 2010 World
Cup. For now, he says, “I better do something better than make
them laugh a little bit. That’s the way I respect the
audience.”
by
Brian
W. Fairbanks