Ninety percent of the time, it's too much to bear even for the audience, so imagine what those people up on the screen are going though. Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu revels in shoveling out far more than a fair share of atrocious luck and tremendous suffering to his characters, and what's more, they're often intertwined with each other in a long, geographical rope of misery and tragedy.
It happened in 2000's "Amores Perros." It happened in 2003's "21 Grams." The clincher was 2006's "Babel," in which one guy's marriage in California falls apart, and the repercussions swing halfway around the globe to shatter the family of a Moroccan goat-herders, then does another tailspin and alters the fate of a Tokyo businessman. Heavy, heavy stuff.
The director is also known for a complex and tortured narrative structure where events loop out and come together, and time sequences shift and merge. In the process, details and tied ends are sacrificed in the name of the bigger picture, which in Iñárritu's case implies maximum drama, maximum feel-badness. It's one of the reasons why critics have been more than a little restrained in lauding one of the most impressionistic auteurs working in cinema today.