Babel Babble
Several movie critics have pointed out the (intentional?) irony that Alejandro Gonzalez Innáritu’s film Babel, with its four interconnecting narratives—two in Morocco, one in Japan, and one between San Diego and Mexico—is a monumental (ha, ha) and ambitious filmmaking effort. The question everyone’s asking is if it succeeds—and, more concretely, if it will succeed in nabbing the Best Picture trophy at tomorrow night’s Oscars.
I just discovered that Babel’s screenplay writer Guillermo Arriaga was also behind Tommy Lee Jones’s movie The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. I like Babel better, mostly because it doesn’t have any snakes and because the characters are more complex, but it has some similarities with Three Burials: an interesting premise, moving and important themes, but a story that doesn’t . . . quite . . . come together.
Babel does have the advantage over Three Burials, though, with its stellar acting (which is not unconnected to the better character writing in this film). As much as I liked Jennifer Hudson’s performance in Dreamgirls, I wouldn’t be upset if the Best Supporting Actress Oscar went to Babel’s Adriana Barraza or Rinko Kikuchi—really, there’s no one I’m rooting against in this category this year!
Rinko Kikuchi, as a deaf-mute Japanese teenager who has recently lost her mother, excels at conveying rage and despair without speaking. Knowing before I saw the movie that her anger manifested itself in some bizarre sexual ways—namely, foregoing panties and flashing young men in public—I expected hers would be the storyline I liked least. Actually, it was the one that ended up being most compelling. When someone finally responds to her character Chieko with compassion—not taking advantage of her, but not shying away from her either—you see some itty, bitty hint of healing occurring.
Neither of the story lines centered around browner-skinned people ends well. Adriana Barraza’s illegal immigrant nanny tale ends with sudden brokenness but little resolution, and the two Moroccan goatherd boys who are unintentionally responsible for the movie’s central event—the shooting of an American tourist—also meet tragedy and injustice.
The fates of these characters—and the movie’s sudden lack of interest in them once their stories turn for the worse—is, I think, intentional. It’s a stark contrast to all the international fuss over the shooting of one white woman (Cate Blanchett)—of course, for a while, all that fuss is mostly sound and fury, signifying nothing, for while the tourist’s story is all over the news, nothing is actually happening to get the seriously wounded woman out of the small town where she’s stranded.
Part of this inaction is due to the U.S.’s immediate accusation of terrorist activity involved in the shooting, which of course makes Morocco less friendly to American embassy efforts to get Susan Jones to a hospital. There’s a lot more attention being paid to tracking down the “terrorist”—an understandable fear on the Moroccan government’s part, given the possibility that, if they don’t produce a culprit, they could be invaded!
But the biggest block to action—and the movie’s central problem—is Richard and Susan Jones’s strange unwillingness to take one of the several available cars to the hospital. It doesn’t even seem to occur as a possibility. I mean, sure, an ambulance would be better and faster, but wouldn’t a car be preferable to sitting in a hut and either bleeding (Susan) or storming about and insulting everyone (Richard)? The movie doesn’t explain why they don’t take any of the available transportation methods, and so the central conflict just doesn’t make sense.
Also, we knew that the couple was in Morocco to try to get over some sort of marital problems, but none the three of us watching the movie figured out—until reading reviews afterward—that they were dealing with the death of one of their three children. I’d thought that Richard had an affair or something. On the bright side, though, I thought that Brad Pitt, as Richard, produced the finest acting I’ve ever seen from him.
SPOILER ALERT!
By the end of the film, you feel relief at the relatively happy ending for the Joneses—and then you feel guilty for feeling such relief, when you haven’t even had a chance to mourn for the endings dealt out to the nanny or the goatherd boys. This feeling of relief mixed with dis-ease is, I think, one of the greatest accomplishments of Babel. It does hit you emotionally—not preachily—with discomfort over American privilege in the international scene.
Some viewers may not have this reaction, though, because of Babel’s confusing plot and loose ends. As my beloved Porpoise said, another implicit message it sends is, “Stay home! Don’t go to third world countries!”
In any case, I’ll be interested to see how Hollywood responds to Babel tomorrow night.
Add comment February 24th, 2007