Review of Babel (2006) by David A — 08 Jun 2010

(from The Watermark, 02/08/07).

It has seven nominations including Best Supporting Actress nods for Barraza and Kikuchi, Best Director (Mexican favorite Alejandro González Iñárritu), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Picture. It already took home the Golden Globe for Best Picture (Drama). Wow. And, to be honest, I just wasn't overly impressed. Babel tells four seemingly unrelated stories: A poor Moroccan shepherd family arms their two sons to protect their herd and things go awry; Pitt & Blanchett are an estranged couple vacationing in Morocco who suddenly need medical care; Barraza is a nanny who is forced to take her charges to a family function in Mexico; Kikuchi is a deaf Japanese teenager dealing with her budding sexuality. The stories eventually link together, sort of, though the Tokyo storyline is so distantly connected to the others, things feel out of balance. An overwhelmingly strong theme to tie it all together would have helped, but there are problems there as well. Referring to the Biblical story of the film's title, the cross-cultural multi-lingual circumstances of the narratives are certainly well designed for confusion and miscommunication due to language issues. But that, too, isn't as prevalent in some of the stories compared to the others, so the film's whole doesn't add up to more than the sum of its parts. And I haven't mentioned that the actual plotlines themselves are at times so unpleasant, I found myself thinking, I'd love to leave this story now, but I really don't care to return to any of the others either. Which is better -- Blanchett having to go through makeshift homemade surgery in a tiny village? Barraza traipsing lost in the desert on the verge of collapse as she desperately tries to save the kids? One of the Moroccan sons spying on his nude sister? Kikuchi humiliating herself for male attention and approval? What we are left with is an experience that we feel we've survived instead of enjoyed, and the only strong supported theme of we-are-all-connected-and-the-world-is-getting-smaller comes off as flimsy if not obvious. Babel is certainly ambitious in its scope and attempt to achieve something that is literally global (hence the Golden Globe given by the Hollywood Foreign Press), it just never quite achieves it. The fault lies in the screenplay, and I for one hope that any of the other Best Picture contenders takes home the Oscar.