Well here’s another Crash wannabe. We get separate stories only barely tied together through loose themes and threads, an abundance of good performances, and a lack of any idea of what to do with it all. Babel is like a love-starved dog who wants to be noticed and loved, but it’s just so annoying you’ve got to lock it outside before it drives you mad with its incessant whimpering.
Babel
2 Stars
I wanted to like Babel, but when I wasn’t bored out of my skull I found myself bewildered by the odd make-up of the film and bizarre choices of its characters. It wants so badly to be important, but lacks the detail necessary, instead providing us with a glut of stories and characters, that neither explored nor developed, which never come together. Is it an interesting film exercise? Maybe. Is it a good film? Not really.
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| A Babel-ing Mess |
Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett) are traveling with a tour group in Morrocco trying to get over the death of their youngest child.
In San Diego Amelia (Adriana Barraza) is taking care of the couple’s two young children, Mike (Nathan Gamble) and Debbie (Elle Fanning), and preparing to attend her son’s wedding in Mexico.
In Morocco two young boys are herding goats and are trying out their new rifle given to them by their father to keep away the jackals.
In Japan a young deaf teen, Cheiko (Rinko Kikuchi), struggles with the suicide of her mother, the long absence and despondency of her father (Koji Yakusho), and her anger at being deaf and being undesirable to young men.
Director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu attempts to weave these stories together; he isn’t entirely successful. The Morroco stories fit, but the others don’t gel with the framework of the film, and the Japanese story stands out as the best of, and most irrelevant to, the other threads of the film.
A film like this, with multiple stories that only vaguely touch on the same themes, either works or doesn’t. This one doesn’t. It’s too self-important, too long winded, and too fractured to make a coherent whole. Themes cross – parenting, bad choices, the need for love, the disconnect of language – but there is no real framework to hold them together. The director relies on the over-used method of the Roshomon-style to give some edge here, but it just makes the events and the timeline of the film confusing.
The film breaks a few of our Rules. First the film screams to be acknowledged by the Award circuit. Here the film breaks our “Oscar Bait Rule,” it has a large list of good performances but sadly lacks a coherent story to justify them.
I could probably have forgiven this flaw in the film, but it’s not the only problem. The film also breaks our “WTF? Rule.” In each of the four stories the characters perform an insane action that fails to make sense either in the framework of the story or reality. The character presented has performed normal sane actions to this point, but here decides to make such an unlikely and ludicrous decision for no reason other than the script calls for it at that moment. I’d like to go into more detail here, but each stark shift in sanity takes place late in the storyline of each plot thread and I don’t wish to ruin the “surprise” for you. Instead I’ll just tell you I shook my head in disbelief as each story vears off the loooong winding road for a side-trip to crazywackofuntown. What a waste.
Is there anything gained from telling these separate stories as a whole? No. Would the stories worked as well or better as separate films? Maybe. These are hard questions and even more troubling answers. Babel gives us some great peromances and moments that are all but drowned out by it’s preening, excessive running time (more than two-hours and twenty-minutes), and repeated forays into insanity.