Never in my life have I been so relieved to see the protagonist of a film drop dead, but the death of Uxbal, _Biutiful_'s main character, still comes more than than an hour after I started looking forward to it. This relentless, pointlessly depressing, depravedly dismal two-and-a-half hours of human suffering might have had some redeeming social value if it were a documentary, but it isn't. Instead, it's meant to be art, which means it doesn't even have truth to recommend it. And that's where Iñárritu's sadistic self-absorption and grim dedication to the pornography of squalor becomes the film's downfall. Yes, there's a feeling of "intimacy," as the NYT writes – the intimacy of cleaning up someone else's vomit. Bardem's noble, expressive face is the only thing that makes many of the film's scenes watchable, but the message of _Biutiful_ is just this: we are lost, we are lost, we are lost. What would appear to be the film's only saving grace (Ige's decision to stay in Spain to care for Uxbal's orphaned children) comes at the cost of immense suffering: she's forced to remain in a country she hates and be separated from the man she loves, who is also her child's father, in order to dedicate herself to righting someone else's disaster of a life. You're trying to tell me that that's _Biutiful_?
