Alejandro G. Iñarritu, who we last checked in with way back at the start of 2016 with The Revenant, now joins Branagh, Gray, and Spielberg in releasing a film this year that comes with a heavy dose of autobiography. I can understand how wanky this can come across to some people, having a filmmaker devote so many hours to their own story (with varying degrees of varnish), but as an auteurist, there’s something I find quite fascinating about these kinds of productions. They take the idea of film as a personal form of art (ignoring how each and every film is the result of collaboration in one form or another) about as far as it can go while still being in the context of a work of fiction. And with this film, we find the director… well, in a pretty dark place.
Rather than being any grand display of self-aggrandisement, a lot of this takes the form of self-punishment on Iñarritu’s part. Through his main character surrogate (journalist and filmmaker Silverio Gama, played by Daniel Giménez Cacho), he puts all manner of insecurities and showings of impostor syndrome on blast. The death of his first-born son, a relationship that didn’t work out from his teen years, his fame, his critical successes and failures; he just lays into himself repeatedly, using surrealist hyperreality to bring his self-doubts into visual clarity. It plays out quite a bit like similar musings in Birdman, to the point where this also features a scene where a critic verbally lacerates the main character, only it’s even more vicious here.
But even more so than anything to do with him as an artist, this film involves quite a bit of him contemplating his connection to places. This is the first time he’s shot a film entirely within Mexico since his debut Amores Perros, and part of those insecurities come from him wondering if this is a return home or a fleeing from home. Silverio brings up his tendency to defend Mexico as a country from Americans with all the “they’re not sending their best” horseshit… while still taking note that there’s a reason why people flee for the border. Among the film’s many hallucinatory passages are depictions of Mexican tragedies both past (the Battle of Chapulepec) and present (the cartels).
There’s even a scene where Silverio ascends a pyramid of corpses to converse with Cortés, the conquistador who conquered Mexico and committed genocide against the Aztecs (maybe this is him taking Robert Downey Jr.’s comment to heart).
While that does lead to some interesting acknowledgements about cultural hypocrisies, nationalism, and the status of Black and Brown civilians in both countries, it is still emphatically about Silverio and his own dreamlike association with the world around him. At nearly three hours long, mainly taken up by DP Darius Khondji’s long shots, it’s a lot to take in, but it’s made more than salvageable by a couple of factors. For one, a lot of the statements made about the entertainment industry and the nature of impostor syndrome make a lot of sense, and even gesture at the hypocrisy of films like this being lambasted as self-indulgent… while the industry around them regularly ‘celebrate’ films with hard anti-capitalist messaging, as if that isn’t a financially-beneficial form of self-flagellation in itself.
For another, the film never devolves into outright boredom with how extensive its screen time can be. The flights of fancy Silverio goes through are beautifully presented, if occasionally head-tilting in the imagery used (I can’t say I’ve ever seen a baby get unbirthed before this), and the way it actively blurs the line between what is film and what is real worked nicely. The bookend shots are particularly good, utilising similar gravity-defying transcendence as Birdman to show Silverio being at his most free when behind the camera. It makes a point of mentioning that the space between productions is when he’s the most miserable, since that’s when the feedback and industry attention takes place, so I get the sentiment of being at ease when you’re busy at work. I mean, with how much I get done at this time of year, I have to acknowledge that.
I can’t say that this is my favourite of these quasi-autobiographies that I’ve seen this year; as much as I can vibe with the auteur sensibilities here, it can get a bit much at times, even downright depressive in how hard Iñarritu beats down on himself by proxy. But by that same token, there’s a lot of palpable angst here, and framing it in a cultural context to do with his connection (or perceived lack thereof) to his homeland and his cultural heritage does a lot to make it into more than just a masturbatory exercise. As a work of art meant to give the artist space to sort their shit out, while still making it entertaining to watch from the outside, I’d say it works but I can totally understand if it doesn’t play as well for others.
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