A certain rancorous ex-colleague, who now hosts a top-rated but horribly crass TV show, tries to get him on for an interview but Silverio fears he will be ambushed with questions about his vulnerable childhood and racist cracks about his indigenous background. Silverio is loved and admired by close friends and family but his journalistic contemporaries have something else in their hearts, revealed in the gigantic party thrown for him by his media comrades in Mexico City – a kind of awestruck envy combined with resentment in the way he has left them behind, commodifying Mexican poverty and wretchedness for the gringos in his films about the experiences of immigrants and the drug business. (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. 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 US and is now receiving a big prize, usually given only to Americans. Alejandro G 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.
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