Alejandro González Iñárritu, Oscar-winning creator of films such as Amores Perros, Birdman and The Revenant, now returns to his Mexican homeland for this quasi-autobiographical epic, which spans a personal magical realist dreamscape where reality and fiction morph into each other in ways that are both technically elegant and massively excruciating.
This is a pretty amazing self-indulgent, self-congratulatory film, somewhere on a continuum between Fellini and Malick, about a Mexican journalist and documentarian who has been handsomely rewarded in the U.S. and now gets a big award, which is usually given. Americans only. (Iñárritu has, I suspect, a somewhat sketchy idea of the working lives of real journalists, documentarians, as opposed to directors of colossal Oscar-winning feature films.) But now, in this moment of triumph, our L’ hero finds himself in a middle-aged identity crisis, plunged into a hole of memories and hallucinatory anxieties about his family, his career and Mexico itself.
Stylish veteran performer Daniel Gimenéz Cacho stars as Silverio, the award-winning filmmaker who we see first in LA (a poignant, surreal setting that we’ll eventually return to) and then in his Mexican hometown where he tries to land an interview with the US president , an interview that the American ambassador offers to set up, on the condition that Silverio drop his criticism of the White House’s anti-Mexican racism. Indeed, we hear a strange piece of news about an attempt by Amazon to buy the Mexican state of Baja California outright as a major fulfillment center, a perverse satire that alerts us to the fact that this movie is produced by Netflix and not Amazon. .
Silverio is loved and admired by close friends and family, but his journalist contemporaries have something else on their hearts, revealed in the gigantic party his media colleagues threw for him in Mexico City: a kind of envy astonishment combined with resentment in the way he did it. he has left them behind, commoditizing Mexican poverty and misery for gringos in his films about immigrant experiences and the drug trade. A certain spiteful ex-colleague, who now hosts a top-rated but horribly rude TV show, tries to interview him, but Silverio fears he’ll be ambushed with questions about his vulnerable childhood and racist jabs about his indigenous background.
He is particularly resentful of his blockbuster documentary epic about Mexico, titled A False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, which playfully imagines what conquistador Hernán Cortés thought and felt in a brutal but whimsically imagined scenario of conquest, a scenario that later Iñárritu had to do. is reinserted into Silverio’s story, which has the effect of making Silverio and Cortés of equal importance in this New Mexico myth.
The film is dotted with brilliant individual moments: there is a stunning sequence in which the streets are littered with the lifeless bodies of Mexico’s “disappeared” – the disappeared claimed by poverty and crime, heartlessly ignored by the state. And there’s a bravura scene where Silverio comes face to face with the ghost of his poor father and tries to tell him all the things he should have said when he was still alive.
There’s a cleverly staged scene in which Silverio, for all his activism, takes his family to a super-rich vacation resort where the servants aren’t allowed to go to the beach, and another when Silverio demands that the US immigration at LAX apologizes for saying that as a Mexican Citizen on an O-1 visa who has no right to call America “home”. The latter is where the film feels most intensely autobiographical (but maybe Iñárritu and co-writer Nicolás Giacobone imagined it all).
It’s done with real gusto, so gusto, in fact, that you can forgive much of the film’s outrageous narcissism. Iñárritu could, if he wanted, tell us an equally painful but less grandiose and self-mythical story about his own life, but he has exercised his prerogative as an artist and given us this confection. Without a doubt, it is spectacular.