Biutiful

*** - Geez oh man… talk about one depressing-assed movie. I mean, I’ve seen some gloomy movies before (“Schindler’s List” comes to mind) but this 2010 Spanish language character drama has got to be up there as one of the sadder ones I’ve seen in some time. Javier Bardem stars as a guy with two youngish kids and an estranged wife who works as a low level criminal living in the slums of Barcelona dealing mainly in black market goods and illegal immigrant transportation and storage. His main partners are his brother (who is also bopping his wife), a couple of gay Chinese guys who run a black market goods warehouse, and a bunch of Africans who he employs as his street vendors. Bardem’s character is diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer and given a few months to live, which results in him to try to make amends with everyone around him. Unfortunately, it all backfires. His African street vendors are arrested and deported after a sting operation conducted by a cop who he was paying off but double-crossed him, about 25 illegal Chinese workers in his employ die in some sort of gas leak while sleeping in a basement, one of the queer Chinese guys kills the other one, and his wife goes on a bender and beats up one of his kids. And he also dies. It’s a pretty effective character study, but is so dark and depressing that it can be pretty hard to get through at times. Plus, it’s like two and half hours long, a length that I am not sure was entirely necessary, especially since the first and last 10 minutes of the movie were the exact same scene.