Alejandro González Iñárritu, Oscar-winning creator of such movies as Amores Perros, Birdman and The Revenant has now returned to his Mexican homeland for this quasi-autobiographical epic, sprawling across a personal magic-realist dreamscape where fact and fiction shapeshift into each other in ways which are technically stylish and massively insufferable.
It’s a quite staggeringly self-indulgent and self-congratulatory film – somewhere on a continuum between Fellini and Malick – about a Mexican journalist and documentary film-maker who has been lavishly rewarded in the United States and is now receiving a big prize, usually given only to Americans. (Iñárritu has, I suspect, a slightly sketchy idea about the working lives of actual journalist-slash-documentary film-makers, as opposed to those of colossally important Oscar-winning feature directors.) But now, at this moment of triumph, our hero finds himself in a midlife crisis of identity, plunged into a rabbit hole of memories and hallucinatory anxieties about his family, his career and Mexico itself.
