Overall Rating
  Awesome: 16.52%
Worth A Look: 13.91%
Average: 24.35%
Pretty Bad: 24.35%
Total Crap: 20.87%
9 reviews, 61 user ratings
|
|
| Babel |
by MP Bartley
"Thankfully two stars out of five means the same in every language."
|
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu was hailed with great reverence when his debut, Amores Perros, a great big, furious, ball of a film hit English speaking shores - a hit that he repeated with Hollywood stars in the similarly splintered 21 Grams. All that Babel shows however is that not only is his message getting stale - people's attitudes to each other suck - but his method of delivery is getting pretty tiresome too.The best way to sum up the fractured, multi-country, multi-character narrative of Babel is through bullet points (which is ironic in itself). To whit -
- Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett) are American tourists in Morocco, trying to repair their bitter marriage. This is a situation drastically altered however, when Susan is shot on a bus by a mysterious assailant, whilst travelling through the mountains and they make an emergency detour to the nearest village, where they have to rely on the primitive methods of medicine to save her. Richard desperately tries to get Susan flown to the nearest hospital, but the shooting has caused a diplomatic incident and Susan's worsening condition quickly becomes secondary to the international reprecussions.
- The shot came from the two young sons of a local goat herder, who were trying out their father's new rifle and used the coach as target practice, and now face the wrath of the equally trigger happy local police.
- Meanwhile in America, a Mexican nanny, Amelia (Adrianna Barraza), takes the two young children she is charged with, over the border for a family wedding without the parent's permission. Predictably it all ends in tears.
- Lastly, in Japan, a deaf and dumb school girl, Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), is angry at the way she is patronised in the world, angry at her father for the death of her mother and uses her growing sexuality in the most awkward of ways - trying to get a decent filling at the dentists for example.
These four storylines all ricochet off each other and have deep rooted links with each other, as Inarritu plays with time once more, showing us pieces of the narrative out of sequence and letting the audience put them together again. While it is admirable that Inarritu has that much faith in his audience, it is clear that he is only doing this in Babel, because he doesn't that much faith in his material - for good reason as he isn't saying anything remotely new here. While Amores Perros bristled with unpredictable anger because of its jagged narrative, and 21 Grams created the feeling of unstoppable tragedy by showing us events out of sequence, Babel achieves nothing with this trick. If coincidence is the new manna from heaven for 'serious' filmmakers (see also Paul Haggis' Crash[/b)], it has also become contrivance of the highest kind.
The link between Richard and Susan and Amelia is so appallingly obvious, it insults our intelligence when Inarritu fills the gaps in blatantly by the films end and the Chieko connection is so tenuous it stretches disbelief that Inarritu believes it would make him seem clever. While creating a sprawling, interconnected storyline may be a lofty ambition, it is utterly negated when it is told in such a dull manner as it is here. We don't remotely care about the unlikeable Richard and Susan, and the Chieko storyline is so bizarre it is completely out of place and never resonates. Amelia's Mexican misadventure is the only story that has an emotional punch to it, but is undermined by the curious subtext that Mexican's are stupid and make life difficult for the rich white folk.
Inarritu's central message is, as ever, shrouded in cloudy pessimism and is a dreary, depressing rumination on how much life sucks sometimes. There's nothing wrong with pessimism, sometimes it can be a refreshing, bitter respite from Hollywood's normally sunny outlook on life, but here it's a smug and patronising pessimism that has the demeanour of a 14 year old goth, just dumped by his first girlfriend and who has retreated to his bedroom to write reams of awful poetry. It's a grim scenario that'll make you go and google pictures of basset hound puppies just to cheer you up afterwards. The dreary set up is reflected in the appropriately dreary performances. There's something terribly perverse about taking the best actress in the world today and saddling her with a role that requires little more than lying on the floor looking pale and gasping for air, and Blanchett can do little with it. Kikuchi is intense but her role is so badly underdeveloped it's all sound and fury signfying nothing, and she's the most lost out of everyone.
Barraza gets the most empathy out of her situation, but again is too underdeveloped to really work, although it's her story that demands the most attention. Brad Pitt meanwhile lets us know that he's in serious mode here - he's grown a beard AND it's grey! It's to little avail however, as he has nothing to do but look worried. They say a truly great actor doesn't need to act with anything else but his eyes, which shows up Pitt's tearful, telephone conversation scene at the end as the Oscar baiting clip it was so clearly designed as. Too bad the Academy wasn't fooled. Never mind Brad, at least he still gets Angelina's lips locked around his gearing stick on a regular basis.If the central message of Babel is that everyone should communicate and get on better, I couldn't agree more. Not only would it make the world a happier place, it would also save us from the crushing self importance of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=15013&reviewer=293
originally posted: 09/24/07 19:17:38
![[printer]](/images/icon/printer.gif) printer-friendly format
|
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.
|
 |
USA
27-Oct-2006 (R)
DVD: 20-Feb-2007
UK
N/A
Australia
26-Dec-2006
![[trailer]](/images/icon/trailericon.gif) Trailer
|
|
Articles 
subscribe to this feed![[AllPosters.com]](/images/icon/ap.gif){kind=icon}
