Iñárritu's fourth feature moves from the spliced-up multiple-story patchworks that constituted
Amores Perros,
21 Grams and
Babel to zero in on a single dad grifting and scrabbling to stay above water in Barcelona. Iñárritu still can't resist a framing device for the main story that only loses its opacity in the coda, but it doesn't appear forced this time, and comes rather as a gratification, unlike a good chunk of the channel-surfing of
Babel in particular. And sticking to a single location pays off too: the weight of the drowning man's burden is made all the more solid with an inability to flee from a fixed round of preset haunts. The one time there is a diversion, with a phantasmagorical nightclub scene, it's only to underline the character's brief escape from reality.
It is almost unrelentingly bleak, with the protagonist battered by a succession of blows, not least his terminal cancer, and one real criticism that can be levelled against the film is Iñárritu's apparent determination to keep kicking the man when he's already down just so the audience fully gets how grim some people's lives are. Without the frankly stupendous Javier Bardem in the role, infusing a lost everyman with a desperate spirituality in a quest to put his house in order, the director probably wouldn't have pulled it off. With him in it, the centre holds.
7/10
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