Hustler searches for salvation through Barcelona’s underworld in ‘Biutiful’

Javier Bardem may not be a miracle worker in real life.

In reel life, however, it's another story.

Witness the wonders Bardem works in "Biutiful" (in Spanish, with subtitles), transforming a relentless downer of a drama into a poignant, occasionally transcendent study of one man's search for salvation. No wonder he's just been nominated for a best actor Osar.

Indeed, I shudder to think how ugly things could have gotten in "Biutiful," which is also up for a best foreign-language Oscar, without Bardem's redemptive presence.

That's because Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu serves as tour director for this particular lower-depths odyssey.

You know Mexico's Gonzalez Inarritu through his 2000 breakthrough, "Amores Perros," and such gone-Hollywood follow-ups as "21 Grams" and "Babel."

In "Biutiful," the director parts ways with screenwriting partner Guillermo Arriaga, whose disjointed, slice-and-dice narrative structure has degenerated from cutting-edge to cliche. (As anyone who, like me, had the displeasure of enduring Arriaga's overwrought 2008 directorial debut, "The Burning Plain," will attest.)

Gonzalez Inarritu may have moved on (Armando Bo and Nicolas Giacobone collaborated on the screenplay, from Inarritu's story), but he hasn't abandoned Arriaga's favorite focus: fate's mysterious, yet momentous, ways.

Destiny rears its ugly head early, and often, in Gonzalez Inarritu's movies, forcing his characters to struggle in an often futile attempt to influence things far beyond their control.

That certainly holds true for "Biutiful's" central character, Uxbal (Bardem).

A hustler in the Barcelona underworld who specializes in illegal immigrant labor, Uxbal may be in a bad business, but he's not a bad guy.

In his way, he genuinely cares about his impoverished charges, from the Chinese sweatshop workers who sew counterfeit designer bags to the Senegalese street vendors peddling them to pedestrians.

When he's not on the streets, Uxbal's trying to raise his two beloved children (precocious Hanaa Bouchaib , impish Guillermo Estrella ) on his own -- because their unstable mother, Marambra (a manic Maricel Alvarez), may be out somewhere drunk, drugged or otherwise unable to deal with life, given her bipolarity.

Besides, Uxbal's got a more pressing medical condition to face: his own rapidly metastasizing prostate cancer, which renders every day of his already challenging existence an even bigger test. Good thing Uxbal has a psychic gift -- for communicating with recently departed spirits. Perhaps they can ease his mind as he contemplates his inevitable, all-too-imminent demise.

Lined up like a string of doomed-to-fall dominoes, "Biutiful's" litany of woe sounds overwhelming -- and, occasionally, a trifle absurd.

Yet, somehow, watching Uxbal work his way through the waking nightmare of his ebbing life seems consistently compelling -- and often far more than that.

For one thing, without the jigsaw-puzzle pressure of Arriaga's fractured narrative structure, Gonzalez Inarritu is free to stretch. Consequently, "Biutiful's" relatively linear storyline frees us to concentrate on the characters, and what's happening to them, without constantly trying to piece together fragmentary clues regarding who, what, when and where.

As to the why of things, best not to ask. "Biutiful" seldom does, beyond a vague notion that, as Andy Warhol once observed, everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

Gonzalez Inarritu and frequent cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (an Oscar nominee for "Brokeback Mountain") certainly do, finding fleeting moments of beauty -- a child's exuberant drawing on a dirty wall, a tattered paper lantern hanging above a warehouse full of desperate, disposable people -- amid the squalor and anguish of Uxbal's downtrodden world.

And, at the center of that world, there's Uxbal himself, who joins Bardem's gallery of utterly unforgettable portraits. (Other standouts: Anton Chigurh, his Oscar-winning embodiment of evil in "No Country for Old Men"; wheelchair-bound, determined-to-die Ramon Sampedro in "The Sea Inside"; and embattled Cuban writer Reynaldo Arenas in "Before Night Falls" -- to say nothing of almost-as-memorable roles in everything from Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" to Pedro Almodovar's "Live Flesh.")

Bardem -- who won best actor honors at last year's Cannes film festival for his portrayal -- has an uncanny ability to disappear inside his characters while maintaining his own distinctive physical presence. He also has an equally rare, especially welcome ability to convey great depths of emotion without resorting to heavy-duty histrionics. A virtuoso artist, he employs the actor's tools -- from posture to gesture to telling glances from those window-to-the-soul eyes -- to explore Uxbal's essential humanity.

In the process, he lifts Uxbal above the movie's sometimes by-the-number tragedy -- and almost single-handedly lifts "Biutiful" above its bleak surroundings to capture the soaring emotions it so clearly longs to convey.

Contact movie critic Carol Cling at ccling@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272.