Wise words from the director of "Biutiful"

"We can't understand what is happening to something if we aren't looking. But nothing is going to happen to that something if we don't look deeply. That's why so many things with incredible potential go unnoticed, because nobody bothers to look.

Like Schrödinger says, what you see in the world is what you get and that determines your destiny. Vitality or mortality is determined by what we choose to see in the other."



"The truth is that many events that shape our lives and our judgment come to us in the form of books or movies and television, and not from reality. Younger generations prefer to have reality reinterpreted for them, edited instead of facing an unpredictable and sometimes boring reality. When I am filming and setting up a camera maybe I am separating myself, and intellectualizing the moment but I keep it and that is the trade off. We are conscious that now we are observing ourselves observe. We document but we don’t participate in the reality."

Alejandro González Iñárritu from the DVD Special Features section of "Biutiful."

This film and its director do look deeply. If one of the duties of great filmmakers is to place us in a world outside of our range of experiences and make us live in it for awhile, then this director and his star have succeeded admirably. This world is incredibly hard to look at, at times, yet it is lyrical and heartfelt. Unlike previous Iñárritu films, all of which are good, it stays true to itself from start to finish. There are no false notes or easy outs. There's never a moment when you feel you are watching "Bardem the actor" instead of Uxbal the man. The rest of the cast are unknowns or amateurs who actually have lived the lives they are portraying. This is Iñárritu's and Bardem's masterwork and the only truly sad thing about it is how quickly it passed from notice.

Rent "Biutiful" and definitely check out the featurettes that accompany the DVD. I defy you not to be deeply moved.