After winning the Best Director Oscar for each of his prior two features (Birdman, The Revenant), Alejandro González Iñárritu might be forgiven a bit of idiosyncratic indulgence. Unfortunately, Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths is an extravagantly navel-gazing bridge too far.
Using Federico Fellini’s 8½ as its foundational inspiration (with a sprinkle of All That Jazz thrown in for good measure), Iñárritu’s latest is a self-referential chore, one whose chaos is as constant as it is obvious, and whose fancifulness is both knocked and defended by the film itself. A carnivalesque auto-celebration-cum-critique that strives to touch upon a wide range of issues—including Mexican identity, artistic independence and co-option, and familial trauma and regret—it’s a deep dive into shallow existential waters.
Iñárritu trimmed 22 minutes from Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths following its less-than-stellar reception at the Venice and Telluride film festivals. Still, in its final two-and-a-half-hour version—premiering on Netflix on Dec. 16 following a theatrical run beginning Nov. 4—the film overstays its welcome, replete with at least four different scenes that would have sufficed as a fitting ending.
Iñárritu is bursting with whimsical ideas and refuses to restrain himself at every turn. That’s the case with its narrative, which repeatedly erases the line between reality and fantasy and doubles back on itself in a circular manner, revealing new details about its tale and characters in the process. It’s also true of an aesthetic marked by soaring and rotating camerawork, look-at-me extended takes, and a score that alternates between mournful orchestral compositions and tuba-heavy circus music. After an hour or so, any faint trace of rollicking serio-comedy energy has vanished, snuffed out by showy set pieces that aim for euphoria and heartbreak and produce only yawns and the desperate urge to check one’s watch.
The center of Iñárritu’s attention is his fictional proxy Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a bearded, floppy haired Marcello Mastroianni type in a black suit and white shirt. Silverio is a reporter turned documentarian who’s about to become the first Mexican to receive a prestigious American journalism award. This inspires in Silverio great doubt, since, as he articulates in one of many rambling, exposition-heavy scenes, he has imposter syndrome and fears being outed as a phony. This is the reason why he bails on an appearance on the TV talk show of his former colleague Luis (Francisco Rubio), who resents Silverio’s success and routinely badmouths his acclaimed cinematic work.
The current target of Luis’ ire is Silverio’s most recent movie—titled (wink wink) False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths—which he slanders for being everything Iñárritu’s film is, at which point Silverio vehemently stands up for his creative decisions and magically silences his adversary.
Alas, preemptively addressing and answering criticisms does not a convincing argument make. From that moment on, Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths operates with an even greater degree of cheeky narcissism than before. That’s saying something, since Iñárritu’s saga—co-written by Nicolás Giacobone—is intensely pleased with itself from the start. That’s when Silverio’s shadow takes great bounding leaps through the desert, and then his newborn son Mateo emerges from the womb, only to demand that he be shoved back inside his mother Camilla (Ximena Lamadrid) because, as the doctor reports, he thinks this world is too fucked up.
This symbolic episode (Mateo, it turns out, died almost immediately after birth) takes place while Silverio sleeps in a hospital hallway, and his ensuing adventure is one in which waking and slumbering realities co-mingle in what appears to be free-association fashion—at least, until the underlying threads connecting everything become impossible to miss.
Iñárritu sticks to Silverio as he traverses a TV studio’s backstage dressing rooms and passageways à la Birdman, shimmies and shakes his way through a gala’s crowded dance floor, works at the breakfast table on an introductory video for his award ceremony, and takes a fateful watery ride on a California public transit train. What’s mildly intriguing the first time around is leadenly explained during return engagements to those same topics and incidents, all of which find Silverio wrestling with feelings of inadequacy, class-based anxieties, and complicated attitudes toward his homeland and Los Angeles (where he’s resided for 15 years).
He’s a man caught—geographically, financially, professionally and personally—between different, albeit intertwined, worlds, and Iñárritu tackles such multifaceted concerns about the state of Mexico and himself, history and modernity, with an exhausting everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach.
Sumptuously shot by cinematographer Darius Khondji, Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths reconfirms that Iñárritu’s formal skills are second to none, but here they’re in service of roundabout and tedious self-inquiry. So up his own you-know-what is the auteur that he stages a bathroom encounter between Silverio and his deceased father, during which the documentarian shrinks down to child size while retaining his adult head, and he plays it for cute pathos rather than as the height of comedy.
The past and the present collide incessantly along this journey, all as Silverio—passively embodied by Cacho—struggles to get a grip on who he is, where he’s from, and what it means for him and his clan to straddle (literally and figuratively) the Mexican-American border. Those knotty issues are as pressing for Silverio as they no doubt are for Iñárritu. However, they’re dramatized in a way that’s at once jumbled and transparent, and ultimately resolved (if you can call it that) via the easiest, and cheapest, device possible.
To say there’s too much crammed into Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths would be an understatement, although the film’s true undoing has less to do with its overstuffed nature than with the clunkiness of its methods.
Iñárritu crafts a swirling, immersive autobiographical fantasia rooted in the fragmented and fraught-with-contradiction state of his own mind (as well as that of his fellow 21st-century Mexicans). Here, that’s highlighted by a confrontation between Silverio and 16th-century Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés atop a pyramid of corpses. Yet it rarely stops elucidating viewers about its maker’s interests and intentions, the result being a ponderous affair whose odyssey of grief, longing, guilt, resentment and healing—all of it taking place on a deliberately artificial cinematic stage—is largely inert. Its lies may, at heart, be true, but given their unswerving stodginess, they’re also the stuff of which tiresome vanity projects are made.
