Netflix let Birdman’s director go as big and self-indulgent as he wanted on Bardo

polygon.com:

This review was originally published in conjunction with Bardo’s theatrical release. It has been updated and republished for the movie’s release on Netflix.

The subtitle of Bardo, the Netflix film from The Revenant andBirdman director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, is A False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths. But as long as we’re attaching pretentious postscripts, a quotation from Macbeth might be more appropriate: Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing. A lot happens in Bardo, much of it surreal. Elaborate musical numbers, dream sequences, alternate histories, and chronological hiccups all factor into this sprawling, whimsical, personal film. But once the lights go up and the spell is broken, all that striking imagery ends up feeling remarkably empty.

To be fair, Bardo’s main character, celebrated Mexican journalist and documentarian Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), is also tormented by the void. He’s a man without a country, both in the sense that he splits his time between Mexico and the United States, and in a more abstract, existential way. Silverio used to be a newsman. Then he left his job and his country to strike out on his own as a documentary filmmaker. He’s found tremendous success in his new career, but something’s still troubling Silverio. He’s deeply insecure, but wildly egotistical at the same time. That sounds like a contradiction, but it’s familiar to anyone who’s ever known any artist, ever.

Bardo feels like a sketchpad or a series of snapshots, knitting together mundane moments with profound to form a loose narrative about Silverio’s life. The story opens with the long-ago loss of a stillborn child, Mateo, whose death still follows Silverio and his wife Lucia (Griselda Siccliani) around. Literally — Lucia