The Thousands

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s drama – his first without longtime collaborator Guillermo Arriaga – is haunting and mysterious. It’s also too long, overdeterminedly grim, and at times annoyingly manipulative. Iñárritu’s Barcelona isn’t Woody Allen’s sunbathed city of love, but a precarious waystation between poverty and prosperity, hope and desperation, the old world and the new, and especially between life and death.

Uxbal (Javier Bardem) is a professional go-between – he supplies merchandise to Senegalese street vendors, facilitates Chinese sweatshop labour, and pays off the cops. Meanwhile, grieving families pay him to pass on messages from the recently dead. His estranged wife Marambra (the mercurial Maricel Alvarez) suffers from bipolar disorder, leaving Uxbal responsible for their two children. He becomes increasingly anxious about their future when he’s diagnosed with terminal cancer, even as he muses about his own absent father and strives to be a father figure to other vulnerable people in the time he has left.

Bardem’s performance has a powerful stillness as subplots crash around him and Iñárritu flickers between squalid naturalism and otherworldly symbolism. Uxbal’s dying struggle to be a good man is poignant in the film’s world, where not even death offers moral absolutes.