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Oscar nominee Javier Bardem delivers commanding performance as dying dad in 'Biutiful'

As a remorseless killer with Justin Bieber's hair, Javier Bardem proved in "No Country for Old Men" that he can take the trappings of any role and make it work.

Javier Bardem as Uxbal - criminal, loving father, psychic, and terminal
cancer sufferer. He is desperate to set things right before he dies.
Javier Bardem as Uxbal - criminal, loving father, psychic, and terminal cancer sufferer. He is desperate to set things right before he dies.Read more

As a remorseless killer with Justin Bieber's hair, Javier Bardem proved in "No Country for Old Men" that he can take the trappings of any role and make it work.

In "Biutiful," his Oscar-caliber gravitas has its greatest challenge to date - the insistently glum world of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, whose list of frothy charmers includes "Amores Perros," "21 Grams" and "Babel."

"Biutiful" is just as much fun - it takes the downbeat globalism of "Babel" and the aching human condition of "Amores Perros" and fills another barrel of laughs.

Bardem is Uxbal, a Barcelona fixer who takes counterfeit goods from Chinese-immigrant sweatshops, sells them through Senegalese-immigrant street vendors, paying off the police from his own cut. He also funnels illegal labor to job sites.

It's a seedy pro file of globalism and exploitation, but, by Inarritu's standards, not too bad.

Wait . . . I forget to mention that Uxbal has terminal cancer, that he has custody of his two kids because his wife is promiscuous and also bipolar - she's tender with the children one minute, hitting them the next.

Which is why his son's a bed-wetter.

This list goes on, as it tends to do in Inarritu, who likes to combine monumental suffering with extreme length (the movie runs 2 hours, 20 minutes).

Here, though, he's shrewdly built his movie around the granite, leonine visage of Bardem, who is front and center in nearly every scene, and commanding throughout - no wonder he received another Oscar nomination. He holds you even as the misery reaches exponential/supernatural levels.

Supernatural?

Yes, on top of everything else, Uxbal talks to dead people. He makes a little money on the side as a medium who communes with the departed, relaying messages of comfort to the next of kin.

This is no ruse - Uxbal is the real thing. It's why he has no fear of dying. What terrifies him is the future welfare of his children.

Here Bardem leads us to the emotional center of the movie, the dying father trying desperately to create some safe space for his children.

His stoic, melancholy visage is a perfect complement to the movie's emotional reserve. There is nothing sentimental in Inarritu, who invokes the images of conventional religion only to underscore the movie's pessimism (the movie's madonna and child images are truly horrific).

The movie's own spirituality is bleak, needless to say. When Uxbal consults another medium for advice, she tells him not to worry about his son and daughter.

The universe, she says, takes care of them.

In Inarritu's pitiless universe, that is cold comfort indeed.