Roadside Attractions Will Likely Distribute Biutiful, By Alejandro González Iñárritu

At this year's Cannes Film Festival, the Best Actor award went to Javier Bardem for his performance in Biutiful, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Though Bardem also won considerable praise from the press for his work, Iñárritu's movie as a whole wasn't embraced quite so heartily. That might be part of the reason that a US distribution deal has taken some time to come together. But now Roadside Attractions seems to be stepping up to the plate.

Deadline says the small company is working on 'a complicated deal' that should get the film into theaters in time for awards consideration. Biutiful also appears at the Toronto Film Festival next month.(You might remember that Focus Features put out a trailer for the film not long ago, but that was an international trailer, as Focus is distributing outside the US.)

The film is the first Iñárritu has made without his collaborator Guillermo Arriaga, from whom Iñárritu split two years ago.

Peter described the film after screening it at Cannes, where he loved Bardem but found the rest of the film lacked focus and exhibited confusing style:

Javier Bardem plays a man involved in a bunch of illegal dealings who learns that he might be dying of cancer. He is a single father of two children, dealing with issues of mortality and legacy.  His former wife is a druggie who is not responsible enough to take care of herself, never mind the children. How will his children live on when he must leave this world? And what does this mean for him? How does a man come to grips with the fact that his time is up? What does he do? How does one make things right?