Babel Review
by Mark R. Leeper (mleeper AT optonline DOT net)November 29th, 2006
BABEL
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: This is a moving but very downbeat film.
Four inter-related tragic stories are told in
parallel. In that sense it is much like last year's CRASH. But the stories do not add up to much other than to say that bad things happen. Rating:
high +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga give us what is we are told the third film in their trilogy, following AMORES PERROS and 21 GRAMS. In it, four interrelated absorbing stories are told in parallel.
A Moroccan goatherd buys a high-powered rifle to protect his goats from jackals. He allows his sons to practice with the gun, and one takes a potshot at a tourist bus. The results have tragic consequences for his family.
Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett play Richard and Susan, Americans on a tour in Morocco. Susan is very cautious about all the tourist sorts of worries like ice cubes from non-purified water. However, she sits next to a window on a tour bus and is very badly wounded by a bullet that mysteriously flies through a bus window. There are no medical facilities nearby to handle such a crisis. But with Susan bleeding profusely Richard must manage the nightmarish situation and try to save Susan's life.
Two American children are left in the care of a trusted nanny Amerlia (Adriana Barraza) while their parents tour Morocco. Amerlia needs a day off to attend her son's wedding in Mexico. Unable to find a substitute babysitter, the housekeeper realizes she has to bring the children into Mexico and to the wedding. Driven by her irresponsible nephew (Gael Garcia Bernal) the four go off across the tense international border.
Kikuchi (Rinko Kikuchi), a hearing-impaired young woman in Japan, has deep emotional problems after the loss of her mother. Her sympathetic father desperately wants to help her, but she is looking for something that he cannot provide. (This story eventually has a minor connection to other story lines, but it seems the most forced connection.)
The film flashes around from Morocco to the United States to Mexico to Japan. The language shifts from Arabic to English to Spanish to Japanese, justifying the title. Each country has a different life style. Each individual story is compelling and well told. BABEL's biggest weakness is its attempt to tie the four subplots together into a single story. The moral of all this is that there is no moral. The problem is not tourism or terrorism or immigration policy or globalization, though we are reminded of all these issues. And perhaps it is even a bit of a relief that this film is not grinding some political axe. The problems the people face is just that bad things happen to good people. The fates may have it in for us. This is a film populated with decent people who are just unlucky. So, perhaps it is saying to enjoy life if and while you can. Even that theme is somewhat undercut by the contrivances tying the stories together. How often do so many dramatic events happen to a single family in a single day? It reminds one of the vengeance of the gods in Greek tragedy. The film as a whole is much less believable than any of its parts are. The glue does not work even if each of the pieces standing alone is a good piece of story-telling and the tension is made stronger by interruptions for jumps to the other stories.
Some small mistakes are nonetheless bothersome. Susan sits on the left side of the bus. When the rifle is fired, that is the side away from the rifle so the shot is impossible.
Perhaps this is just four stories of unfortunate people and the stories are connected in an unlikely contrivance. There is a lot that is done well in the film, but it is still flawed. I rate the film a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10.
Mark R. Leeper
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Copyright 2006 Mark R. Leeper
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
