Before I begin, I'd like to thank Roger Ebert, who apparently using his internet superpowers came across my post on At the Movies and linked to it on Twitter. I hope I was able to gain a few more readers as a result (I'm not expecting too much), but it's a blip on the radar. Hopefully soon I make a "bleep". Bleeps are louder.
Anyway, thanks to any new readers that might exist. I'll try not to let you down.
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Is impressive storytelling as impactful when it appears to serve no ultimate purpose? That’s the question that rolls around my head as I reflect on my viewing of Babel, the 2006 film from Alejandro González Iñárritu, a director whose name I will spend the entirety of this post copy-and-pasting. This film has the intention of making a million points about a million different themes, but never really gets around to making any of them stand out. The trailer advertises the film as a look at the difficulties man has communicating between languages. In the finished product this is more of a backdrop than a theme.
As I watched the first third of the film I was getting ready to love it, and I eagerly anticipated where the story would take me. As it turned out it only picked me up and dropped me off down the street. We jump back and forth between Morocco, Japan, the United States and Mexico telling us stories of various culture clashes that all turn out to be connected. In Morocco we meet a goat-herder named Abdullah who buys a rifle to shoot jackals. He ends up sending his sons Yussef and Ahmed, and they end up shooting at a tour bus. When they suspect they have hit the bus, they run.
On the bus, Susan Jones (Cate Blanchett) is hit by the shot, sending her husband Richard (a quite good Brad Pitt) into a panic. There is no hospital nearby, but due to political tension between the United States and Morocco help doesn’t appear to be coming. Meanwhile, their children are back in California, but their housekeeper Amelia has a wedding in Mexico that night. Unable to find another sitter, Amelia takes the kids to Mexico. Everything goes perfectly fine until they try to get back into the States.
In Japan the movie seems to take place on another planet. A young, deaf Japanese girl named Chieko is struggling with her mother’s suicide and her sexual frustration. This story has no connection to the others except for a convenience, and thematically it hampers anything else the film tries to do. There is a scene towards the end when Chieko attempts to seduce a detective by stripping nude, a scene which should have been handled far more delicately. I truly think that if the film removed the Japan story and expanded on everything else, there would have a whole lot more meat on the bone.
However, Babel is anything but a boring film. Iñárritu’s direction is near perfect throughout, and at nearly 150 minutes it seems to zoom by with relative expedience. This could be because it zips between stories rather quickly, and all of them are interesting within themselves. In fact, each yarn could be a very good movie in its own right, but what “Babel” lacks is a coup-de-gras: a moment that convinces us that what we have just sat through was all worth it. Even telling each story separately in chapters instead of the fragmented, out-of-sequence style seen here might have improved it. The screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga is convinced in all of his later films that if he tells his stories out of sequence it will all seem more profound, but it can merely come off as a self-serious Pulp Fiction (a film which only told one story at a time, by the way).
I am clearly in the minority on Babel, as it was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay at the 2007 Oscars, losing the big race to The Departed. Sadly, I came away from it far less fulfilled than I anticipated or wanted to. It thinks it’s making profound observations about the world we live in, but all it does is bring them up then jump halfway around the world for another story. It’s not very far from being a very good film, maybe even a great one, but that would require a few pieces to be moved around or abandoned altogether. There’s certainly ambition here, and a great director behind the camera, but the material ends up having little emotional heft.
Rating:
(out of 4)
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