Each frame of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest, Biutiful, is a lovingly composed photograph. Every word is chosen carefully. Each performance is measured and full of resonance, particularly Javier Bardem. He effectively conveys the mood of a man carrying the weight of not one, but two worlds on his shoulders, with a gaze even deeper than his voice. On the surface, Iñárritu looks to have done everything right. The only problem: all that useless beauty and depth of emotion floats aimlessly in Iñárritu’s needlessly over-complicated, self-consciously tricky narrative.

This is the director’s first film without longtime screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, who wrote his first two films, Amores Perros and 21 Grams, and with whom he co-wrote Babel. The difference is immediately apparent, as Biutiful largely follows a much more linear path than those films. That doesn’t mean that Iñárritu is done with trying to be clever with the way he allows the story to unfold. In this case, that effort is reflected in a sprawling exposition to the film that drops tiny pieces of information about each character, sometimes leaving out important pieces of information from one scene to heighten the surprise when the blanks are completed in the next.

But the structure is only there for its own sake, and adds nothing to the story except length. At nearly two-and-a-half hours, the film could use serious trimming, starting with that first 40 minutes, which could probably impart the same information much more economically and, more important, gracefully, in about 15.