Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B
Special Effects: B+

If I was left with any prevailing idea of Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, it was that memory is an abstraction. This film has been widely reported to be deeply autobiographical on the part of director and co-writer Alejandro G. Iñárritu. It’s also immediately surreal, in ways that take a great deal of time to make sense, in a film that goes on for two hours and thirty-nine minutes.

I’m not sure I would have immediately jumped to declaring this movie pretentious, but about an hour and ten minutes in, Bardo declares itself so. This was where I found myself grateful for the film to be streaming on Netflix—after a very limited theatrical release in November, in one local location inconvenient to me; otherwise I would have seen it then—because the egotistic documentarian protagonist is met with a diatribe by a friend at a party, and I was able to write down the monologue in its entirety. Here, Iñárritu takes it upon himself to use a supporting character to make these judgments before we as viewers even have a chance to:

I think it’s pretentious. It’s pointlessly oneiric. It’s oneiric to cover up for your mediocre writing. It’s a mishmash of pointless scenes. Half the time, I wanted to crack up, the other half I was dying of boredom. It’s supposed to be metaphorical, but it lacks poetic inspiration. It feels stolen. Plagiarized. And you barely covered your tracks. … It’s banal, random. And then, later, within this same conversation: You couldn’t check your ego. And: What the fuck were you trying to say?

The thing is, there are many layers of irony to this monologue. Iñárritu invites us to dismiss his cinematic self-indulgence, while seeming to congratulate himself for the brilliance of this very action. Which only makes the entire enterprise that much more pretentious.

I found myself wondering why he would make this character who was clearly an avatar for himself, Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a journalist-turned-documentarian, rather than a narrative film director like himself. Then it occurred to me that perhaps his profession is an on-the-nose metaphor: filmmakers are on an endless quest to represent universal truths. Journalists and documentarians fancy themselves representatives of fact, while often losing sight of their own inherent subjectivities. Bardo is a film easy to intellectualize, and yet it left me unconvinced that it deserved it.

Indeed, the vast majority of Bardo is a series of surreal or abstract vignettes, although by the end Iñárritu manages to tie them all together in a relatively clever way. Meanwhile, he even manages to infuse the narrative with Silverio’s (and, predumably, his own) conflicting emotion between a love of his birth nation of Mexico and how that’s complicated by a decision to move to and raise a family in California.

There are many references, both visual and textual, to Mexican history, particularly the Mexican-American War. There’s a few nods to the Spanish colonialism that gave birth to Mexico itself, and its lasting legacy with class divides between rich white Mexicans and their typically darker-skinned servants. I wondered to what degree “White guilt” was infused into these narratives. In one of many jarring narrative and visual shifts, we cut to Silverio walking a long tracking shot through an empty plaza, until he comes upon a giant mountain of largely naked bodies. This was the one moment in the film when I literally said out loud, “What the fuck?” But then, I have to give Iñárritu credit: this sequence ends with a twist so clever I can’t spoil it. I laughed out loud.

Iñárritu seems to be using Bardo to reckon with his own success. “Success has been my biggest failure,” Silverio declares. Is that what Iñárritu is saying of himself? Is this a nearly three-hour exercise in his lack of self-esteem or confidence in his work? It certainly isn’t humility, not with bravura filmmaking this assured. This is a man who knows how to work a camera, and the technical achievements, as with many of his films (see Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) or The Revenant), consistently impress.

It’s the narrative, such as it is, that is the potential problem with this one. I would not go so far as to call this movie “bad,” but it’s easily the least-good of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s mainstream films. Strangely, it’s neither as profound as it seems to want us to think it is, nor as bad as it wants us to think Iñárritu believes it is. Many have dismissed this film as “self-indulgent,” as though any film, particularly any autiobiographical one, weren’t exactly that. I’ve even read it being described as “outrageously narcissistic,” and while I would concede it’s narcissistic, I can’t agree that it is outrageously so. Getting back to that metatextual monologue suggesting we either want to laugh at it or are bored to death of it—I had neither reaction to it, nothing so extreme. I found this movie oddly compelling in spite of itself.

It’s way too long—that much is certain. And yet, virtually every sequence is beautiful to watch. Another memorable line of dialogue: “Life is just a series of senseless events. You must give in to it.” This is the best advice for anybody watching Bardo. If you go into it expecting something very open about how it self-consciously presents itself as “art,” you might find its universe surprisingly inviting. You’ll just need to set aside enough time for it.

*Just give it time and you might make sense of it.*

Overall: B