Javier Bardem on Biutiful, Barcelona, and the Economy of Exploitation (Oscars Included)

I could feed you that tired old line about Javier Bardem delivering the performance of a lifetime etc. etc. in Biutiful, but come on. Why lie? The reality is that Bardem has delivered such richly drawn, deeply layered work for years, from his role as doomed Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls to the right-to-die proponent Ramon Sampedro in The Sea Inside and even the affectless, coin-tossing killer Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men -- all canonical characters of the last decade, all justifiably Oscar-nominated (with the latter winning). It is fair to say Biutiful's struggling, terminally ill Barcelonan eclipses them all; so when will Bardem receive the awards-season recognition he deserves?

I've gone on at length about Bardem as Uxbal -- the harrowing, ghost-whispering, immigrant-exploiting single father who must come to grips with terminal cancer and the legacy he leaves his children -- and I've little to add beyond observing the long emotional shadow has had over all of its viewers in recent months. (Sean Penn called Bardem's performance the best since Brando's in Last Tango in Paris, which... well, I won't argue.) But what's ultimately striking is the yield of professionals functioning at incredibly high levels, whether Bardem, or director Alejandro González Iñárritu (for once restraining his on-the-nose narrative histrionics), or screen newcomer Maricel Álvarez as Uxbal's estranged, bipolar wife, or cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, who shoots the film like a secret between you and its characters. You almost can't believe it's happening, and then, for months afterward, you can't help but give thanks as a filmgoer that it was.

Bardem and I spoke back in September at the Toronto Film Festival, a conversation perhaps best reviewed after having seen Biutiful. (The spoilers are mild, but the references are important.) And you really should see Biutiful, if only for the necessary background before marching on the Academy for a Best Actor nomination in Bardem's name. Anyway.

Beyond this film featuring a excellent performance, it features an excellent collaboration between you and Iñárritu. How did that commence, and how did it develop over production?

I've always been a big fan of his. As an actor, you can watch the performance in his movies and know: "Hmm. This man knows how to put it together." Of course, they're great performances by Sean [Penn], Gael [Garcia Bernal], and many others. Brad [Pitt]... whoever. You go, "This man really cares about people. He puts the camera in the place where it's the right place -- all the time." You see the right things. I've always expressed that admiration and that desire to work with him. And then one day, out of the blue, he came with a script. I was like, "Wow." And I read it, and I felt intimidated. No, not intimidated. Well... [Pauses] Yeah, intimidated. No... [Pauses] Like I had to read it again to know what would be the sacrifice involved -- personally. I read it three times and I called him up and said, "Listen, I don't know if I'm ready to survive diving into this." What the movie speaks about is something important that needs to be told. But also, more selfishly, the layers of the character are so many to fulfill that I felt like they were handing me an opera to sing.

Uxbal is both a product and a producer of a Barcelona a lot of people have never seen onscreen. How does the city influence those layers and the directions you take this character?

I think it represents a part of a community that is really struggling to make a living off of the misery of others -- which, in some ways, we all do. We have a great living based on the misery of other people. There are mines where people work so we can have cell phones. It's not for us to feel guilty about. That's the way the world works. We have cars that need oil, and then we invade Iraq and we bomb the hell out of them so we can have cheaper oil. They said something about weapons of mass destruction, but I don't know what that was. I haven't seen any of those. So anyway, we have that system. What about a person who really needs to provide food and education and the minimum of security to those kids he has -- in a world like this, where he has not many chances to make money? But life -- or in this case death -- faces him and says, "Uxbal, this is what is going to happen to you for a reason. What are you going to do to give a legacy to those kids, and make those kids feel more at peace with themselves and feel loved?"

Then the confrontation happens: He has to go to the outside world to fight and do wrong things, but at home, he has to teach them how to love and have compassion and how to love each other. And that's what I loved about the script: There is no good and evil. There are people indifferent to those two things.

Yet as I was watching this, I thought, "If he were not dying, he would be complex. But he would not be sympathetic." Did that paradox come up for you?

It's a terrific point, totally. It's funny that you mention that, because it's what I do with all my characters. And it's a very interesting thing to do: We have the script, we have the lines, we have the scene, we have the circumstances, and we are focusing on how to portray that. But the interesting thing is to say, "Why is he acting like that?" He's acting like that because in that very moment -- this very moment -- something happened to make him act like that. If this man, as you say, were not going to die, would he behave differently? Of course.

So the way you have to portray it is that a man is the way he is, but then he has a shock -- something very powerful in his life -- and he has to react to that. So he's a person who's constantly reacting to something that was unexpected. And it's a tragedy in the sense of a Greek tragedy: In the plays, the gods will appear two or three times in the play to tell the human beings how week they are. They'll send storms and thunder and plagues and earthquakes for them to realize they have flaws, and they have to learn things in order to become divine. In this case there are no gods but death itself saying, "I'm here for one reason, and you know that reason: It's those two kids. What are you going to give them as a legacy?"

And despite demonstrating his capacity for both extraordinary tenderness and extraordinary discipline -- sometimes within seconds of each other -- he never alienates them or us. How did you find yourself walking that line along the way?

We talked about it, and we always saw him as a man of few words. He's a man of actions. We have the time -- because we have jobs, we have a good living, we have money, we can eat well, we are educated -- to think too much. That's why depression, anxiety, panic attacks and the like are the [top] diseases of the modern world. We have too much time to think. People who don't have time to think, act. Basically, they react -- and fast. So it was very important not to make a thinker out of this person, but a person who wants to give some warmth to that kid while making sure he eats that food, that he lies down, to go back because he doesn't want him to be scared... Those are the things that make the character -- but with few words. It's not about, "I think you should do this..." No. It's about "Do it. Do it, do it, do it," because this is about doing. We live in a world -- his world -- where we cannot think, only do.

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