Every awards season is rife with injustices, but one in particular stands out so far this year. Javier Bardem's performance in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's haunted, crushing tone poem "Biutiful" is a towering achievement, a magnificent performance that should comfortably sit on every list of the great acting accomplishments of the year. Without saying much – Jesse Eisenberg likely spouts more words in the opening three minutes of "The Social Network" than Bardem does in the whole of "Biutiful" – Bardem subtly evokes and embodies a world-weary Everyman living with a ticking clock and the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Guillermo del Toro has called Bardem's performance "monumental"; Sean Penn said it's the best thing he's seen since Marlon Brando in "Last Tango in Paris." "When I saw 'King's Speech,' I thought Colin Firth gave the best performance I'd seen in a couple of years," Ben Affleck told me at a party for "The Town" a couple of weeks ago. "Then I saw 'Biutiful.'" He shook his head. "Javier is on another level from the rest of us."
Memo to Academy members: SAG and Globe voters blew it, badly. Don’t you do the same.
(Photo by Michael Buckner/Getty Images)
When you appeared at theWrap screening series with "Biutiful," you took a moment at first to "let people breathe," as you said, and then you lightened the mood. Was that deliberate?
Yeah. I know what they've gone though, and I respect that. I want them to breathe, and I want them to enjoy. And little by little they start to warm up and realize that they’ve gone though a real emotional experience, a psychological experience, almost a physical experience. And also, through the humor they detach themselves a little bit from what they saw.
People's faces don’t lie. You can tell the experience that they’ve already had, and after that moment of breathing that you need to give, then they jump with questions that come from a different point of view. It's like, they need to express themselves, they need to share the journey that they had with the other audience members.
Certainly it's a movie that sticks with you, not one where you walk out and say, "That was entertaining."
No, no, no. I think it is not easy to do one of those. I've been working for 22 years, and I've done a lot of things. Some of them were watchable, some of them just okay, some of them were mediocre, and I was even lucky enough to be in some good movies. But to find material that really speaks at that level to people is not easy.
You've said that it took you three of four readings of the script before you got it. What was it about the script that finally did connect with you?
Most of the time as an actor, you think, I know what this is, I know how to get there.
