“It’s almost fascist”: the movies Alejandro G Iñárritu called delusional
He may only have seven features to his name, but that’s been more than enough to cement Alejandro G Iñárritu as one of the most innovative and accomplished auteurs in world cinema.
There have been missteps along the way – with the self-indulgent, overlong, and altogether polarising Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths the most recent example – but the odd bout of navel-gazing can be forgiven when he’s among the very best in the business.
Remarkably, Iñárritu has yet to make a movie that hasn’t been nominated for at least one Academy Award, with the aforementioned Bardo sneaking onto the ‘Best Cinematography’ shortlist despite being the weakest effort of his entire career. He’s made a habit of racking up accolades like there’s no tomorrow, so when he passes judgement on a genre, it’s coming from a place of knowledge.
With four competitive Oscars to his name split across three categories and an honorary prize for virtual reality project Flesh and Sand, Iñárritu has made it his business to push the artistic, narrative, and technological boundaries of cinema to new heights each time he steps behind the camera.
From the complex structures and aching emotion of Amores perros, 21 Grams, and Babel being united by a single underlying theme to Biutiful picking apart a protagonist already in danger of coming apart at the seams, the one-shot stylings of Birdman and the intense undertaking on every level that was The Revenant, the filmmaker rarely leaves a stone unturned in his pursuit of greatness.
He works on a different plane to the majority of his counterparts, and while he’s neither interested nor enamoured with how mainstream Hollywood generates the most amount of revenue, he did feel compelled to follow in the footsteps of many peers and take a shot squarely across the bows of the industry’s most lucrative enterprise.
“For me, superheroes represent that vision of humans as flawless and certain, and all those things that are a delusional projection of how human beings should be,” he told Film Comment. “It’s almost fascist. There’s something very scary about that, the vanity. And for me, humans are exactly contrary to all that. I’ve never met a human like that.”
Not that he ever gave off the impression of being someone who’d be found cheering in the aisles when ridiculously good-looking and chiselled specimens squeeze themselves into spandex and fight a CG-created army of some kind, with Iñárritu’s major bugbear largely coming from the lack of humanity on display.
He’s hung his storytelling hat on people “who are much more dimensional and contradictory and flawed and driven by fears and anxiety, but at the same time, beautiful, pathetic, lovable creatures that I find fascinating,” sentiments that by and large do not apply to the comic book adaptation.
Iñárritu even hypothesised that the reason behind the 21st century superhero boom is because “the world is in such bad shape,” which seeped into cinema to create a sense of “shame about seeing humans on the screen.” That’s one way of looking at it, not that he minded leaning on Michael Keaton’s Batman baggage to add another layer of metatextuality to Birdman.
