Babel Review
by Steve Rhodes (Steve DOT Rhodes AT InternetReviews DOT com)November 15th, 2006
BABEL
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2006 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): **
BABEL is an excessively ambitious film which tells four interlaced stories set on no less than four countries and three continents. BABEL's director Alejandro González Iñárritu rose to prominence on the basis of his wildly overrated AMORES PERROS. His 21 GRAMS was a good film, more in spite of him than because of him, as it contained a couple of superlative performances by Sean Penn and Naomi Watts. The lethargically paced BABEL alternates between being kind of boring to being mildly interesting. None of the stories feel very genuine or particularly important.
The movie starts in a remote area of the Moroccan desert, where a couple of boys, who appear to be about 12 and 15, are playing with their dad's new rifle. On a lark, one boy points the gun at a tour bus in the distance. He accidentally wounds Susan (Cate Blanchett), so her husband Richard (Brad Pitt) wants to get in touch somehow with the U.S. Embassy, which inconveniently doesn't have a local drive-in facility. The other tourists on the bus are scared that the locals will kill them. This, of course, begs the question of why they went on vacation to Morocco in the first place if they think it's so dangerous. This gunshot heard 'round the world is immediately assumed to be from a terrorist. This is one of the movie's many illogical moments. Why would a lone sniper terrorist hang out in the middle of nowhere to fire a single bullet?
Meanwhile back in the states, the maid to Richard and Susan's kids is upset. Richard claims that he just can't find anyone to come and get the kids, so the maid will have to miss her own son's wedding. Her solution is to take kids across the border into Mexico, where the wedding is to take place.
In the most inconsequential but somehow the most interesting of the stories, Rinko Kikuchi, who is actually in her 20s, plays a very horny teenager named Chieko, who is a deaf mute. Appearing to be about 17, she is so obsessed with sex that she grabs her dentist hand and thrusts it in between her micro-mini skirted legs, where no panties block his way. He snaps back in fear and revulsion as his hygienist walks in.
BABEL is rated R but shouldn't be. The movie includes sequences of a 12-year-old boy masturbating and of a 17-year-old character doing her own Sharon Stone imitation, except this teen shows off her pubic hair twice and much slower than Stone did in BASIC INSTINCT. If this isn't enough to get the film rated NC-17, then what is? In contrast, John Waters's A DIRTY SHAME got an NC-17 just for language. The MPAA blows it again, apparently basing their ratings more on the studio's clout than on the material on the screen.
To emphasize how realistic we should think the story is, the director instructs his cinematographer to jiggle the camera as much as possible. Inducing motion sickness is the popular trick of many would-be important directors. BABEL's director also likes cutting back and forth between stories and time sequences to further jar us. In the end, after almost two-and-one-half hours, we leave as exhausted as we are unsatisfied. BABEL never comes close to amounting to anything. Perhaps at a full hour shorter, it might have been watchable.
BABEL runs 2:22. The film is in English and in Spanish, Japanese, Berber, Arabic and Japanese Sign Language with English subtitles. It is rated R for "violence, some graphic nudity, sexual content, language and some drug use" and would be acceptable for older teenagers.
The film is playing in nationwide release now in the United States. In the Silicon Valley, it is showing at the AMC theaters, the Century theaters and the Camera Cinemas.
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