The best movie of 2000, Amores Perros, is a hip urban tragedy from Mexico with a dose of dark whimsy. How one walks away feeling afterwards will vary significantly from person to person.
It consists of at least three main interconnected stories and a few secondary ones. They are all sad, painting a depressing picture of modern Mexico City, but they are also hopeful. Images are raw, graphic, and full of animal (both literally and figuratively) brutality, but there is also charm in the film. Pulp Fiction is the model (especially when the film is being hip) but the tone of Amores Perros is of a different state of mind altogether. In some ways, Amores Perros is more disturbing than Pulp Fiction, if only because we can feel Alejandro González Iñárritu’s pain for his homeland.
Dogs are the interlocking motif of the film, and throughout Amores Perros humans consistently behave worse than their dogs. Like the dogs used for fighting in Mexico’s underworld, men can be ravenous, savage, and not above killing each other. But with proper training, we humans can be our own best friends and by the end of the film, each personal story ends with the taming of a beastly heart. Like beasts, the characters in Amores Perros cannot be judged.
One story involves Octavio (Gael Garcia Bernal) who makes an illicit living entering his dog in fights. But he has an obvious love for his sister-in-law Susana (Vanessa Bauche) and gallantly defends her from her tyrannous husband, his brother Ramiro. A second story focuses on El Chivo (Emilio Echevarria), a former guerilla sniper who is now a hired killer. But he loves animals and adopts abandoned dogs to compensate for his estranged family.
Iñárritu doesn’t dwell on the sadness of their lives. Rather, he distances himself and watches them from the outside. He observes them instead of commenting on their behavior. This approach proves more rewarding as we are never told what to think of these people.
How does El Chivo feel when he sees his victim’s obituary in the paper? If his response seems callous, we soon see that he is not immune to grief. The next obituary touches him profoundly. It was someone he had a deep connection to. We learn later that this was his ex-wife, mother to his estranged daughter.
We get the feeling that El Chivo is selective about which jobs he accepts. If he agrees to kill only those he believes deserve to die, it could explain his apparent lack of remorse and make a case for a certain code of ethics in his method. Such guesses are the way of Amores Perros, a film with virtually no heroes or villains, but only real people.
Along with dogs, the three stories are interconnected by the theme of family disunions. Ramiro and Susana make a dysfunctional couple, and Ramiro and Octavio are brothers only by name. El Chivo’s daughter has forsaken her father and for good reason. Yes, they prove that people can be pretty barbaric to each other. Octavio has his own brother ruffed up by some goons, elsewhere, a young business man hires El Chivo to take out his own brother.
The “Big Game” of Amores Perros is a car crashing that forces these lives to rub elbows. Rather than a climax it is a turning point making the movie flow like a river in different directions.
In between the stories of Octavio and El Chivo is the story of Daniel (Alvaro Guerrero) and Valeria (Goya Toledo), and a story about an adulterous affair has never been as touching and wouldn’t work without Iñárritu’s refusal to pass judgment on their actions. They are who they are and do what they do for reasons only they understand. But we know soon that Valeria’s toy dog Richie is doomed when a game of catch becomes the focus. It is poor Richie that is punished for the behavior of Daniel and Valeria. After all, had Daniel not left his wife for Valeria, they never would have moved to their penthouse apartment with a hole in the floor…which is right where Richie falls through. But Daniel and Valeria are punished as well. Suffering a fractured leg after the fateful car crash, Valeria is dropped form her modeling contract and forced into a secluded life of boredom in the apartment while Daniel goes to work. Gradually, their relationship deteriorates. Instead of a child’s death, a dog lost in a bizarre way is the cause of their decline as a couple. But it also unlocks a bigger problem. Valeria is a needy woman while Daniel is a self-centered narcissist. He can’t be faithful to one woman and the movie makes it clear that Valeria will soon be discarded in the same way Daniel’s wife was discarded. But who can deny the tragedy of the moment when Valeria looks out from the apartment’s big windows as the billboard from he modeling days is pulled of a skyscraper, taking all traces of her former glory down with it?
Followers of telenovelas will recognize plenty of guideposts in Amores Perros but there is also a level of surrealism that harks back to Mexico’s rich folkloric history. The stories are told as if they were local legends, but their humanity is overwhelmingly real.
El Chivo doesn’t really like killing people, he does it to survive. More over, he hates who he has become. His daughter’s neglect has turned him into an unkept, shaggy, and dirty gun for hire. When he sees the life altering crash, however, helping the survivors takes precedent over finishing an assassination job.
Amores Perros is a movie about sad lonely lives, but Iñárritu doesn’t railroad us to see things that way. Except for El Chivo’s loneliness, he offers no excuse for the actions of these people. It’s the only right decision for a movie so true to life. Sometimes in the real world, there are no reasons for the things we wish had reasons.
Amores Perros is the greatest and most fulfilling movie of 2000 among the top ten of the decade. It is a masterpiece and more. It marks the discovery of Alejandro González Iñárritu, one of the few geniuses working in the movies today. And still there is more because Amores Perros is a rarity. It is one of the very few nearly perfect cinematic expressions.