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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 16.67%
Worth A Look: 13.16%
Average: 24.56%
Pretty Bad: 24.56%
Total Crap: 21.05%
9 reviews, 60 user ratings
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| Babel |
by U.J. Lessing
"All Talk"
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“Babel” is high-melodrama masquerading as high-art, but then that seems to be a popular trend these days. The film takes its main characters, spreads them out all over the world, and subjects them to emotionally and physically tortuous situations. Think last year’s “Crash” on a global scale.The filmmakers create four interconnected stories that take place in San Diego, Mexico, Morocco and Japan, and the narrative weaves from one story to another. I think director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu wanted to focus on how human beings struggle when they are outside their own societal comfort zones. Instead, for the most part, we get samplings of people suffering in contrived situations.
The film begins with two children in Morocco who get a hold of their father’s rifle and practice firing it at the cars that drive by the main road near their village. One of their bullets slams into the shoulder of Susan (Cate Blanchett), an American tourist vacationing with her husband Richard (Brad Pitt). The wealthy couple is trying to mend their faltering relationship after the death of their baby, and the story follows the couple as Susan attempts to hold on to life miles away from any conventional western medical attention.
Pitt and Blanchett adequately inject drama into their scenes together, and there is an interesting contrast between the compassion of their ethno-phobic companions versus their kindhearted Moroccan tour guide and his family. However, there’s very little that seems genuine in these moments. One also wonders how Susan can be wounded so seriously while remaining so cognizant.
The second story concerns Richard and Susan’s children. With the pair facing peril in Morocco, their Mexican nanny, Amelia (Adriana Barraza) decides to take their two young kids with her to Mexico for her son’s wedding. The first half of this episode is beautiful as the children quickly become acclimated to the culture and absorbed by the community’s love.
All of this is quickly abandoned though in favor of a histrionic misadventure on the way back to San Diego. In point of fact, filmmakers need to stop underestimating their viewers’ intelligence by having their characters make decisions that no one in the audience would ever make. Amelia’s actions do not match her aptitude established in the first part of the installment.
The third narrative follows the Moroccan children and their family as inspectors who believe the shooting was the work of terrorists, begin their investigation. These kids clearly spend more time in the adult world than as children, but the screenplay is so concerned with keeping their narrative moving, that there is no time for any character development.
The fourth installment isn’t as interrelated as previous sections. Yet it’s the most fascination fragment. A deaf and dumb teenage girl (Rinko Kikuchi) lives in Tokyo with her father, a wealthy widower. She communicates using sign language, but lives in an overwhelming culture full of people who cannot literally and emotionally understand her. One senses that the death of her mother left her expressively isolated from everyone around her, and she begins to resort to promiscuity to numb her depression.Kikuchi is the only actor in the production who is asked to take serious risks in her characterization, and her performance almost saves “Babel” from collapsing under the weight of its own self-importance.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=15013&reviewer=396
originally posted: 01/14/07 09:59:35
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2006 Toronto Film Festival For more in the 2006 Toronto Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2006 Chicago Film Festival For more in the 2006 Chicago Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
27-Oct-2006 (R)
DVD: 20-Feb-2007
UK
N/A
Australia
26-Dec-2006
![[trailer]](/images/icon/trailericon.gif) Trailer
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