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Babel
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February 15, 2007 - Cory "Rosetta Stone" Harris (Columnist)
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"Ba weep gra na wepp ninny bong." |
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I wasn’t going to see Babel. I really wasn’t. But when I walked past my local theater, I heard a voice: an unintelligible, foreign voice. Not knowing where it was coming from, I was prepared to move on, when I heard it again. I stopped my breathing, and finally located the origin.
The Babel movie poster was talking to me.
I couldn’t understand it, of course. The words, if you could call them that, floated on the wind, and only the slight pulsating of the towering and vertically justified word “Babel” convinced me that I wasn’t insane. “I’ll be back to find out what you said,” I told the poster, causing an old man who was yelling racist slurs at the Letters From Iwo Jima poster to look at me like I was crazy.
I spent the next 143 minutes in a slickly directed, visually stunning, emotionally charged tale full of sound and fury but signifying only half of what it wants and tries to. The ultimate idea of Babel can be described as an amalgam of two strands. The first is the butterfly effect of a single event, in this case a gunshot fired quasi-innocently by two Moroccan boys at a tour bus, piercing the window and striking an American woman in the clavicle. The rest of the story unfolds when this becomes an international incident that brings governmental havoc and suspected terrorism to the boys, their family and neighbors. Of course, this has effects around the world, including causing the American couples’ children’s illegal immigrant caregiver to take them to her son’s wedding in Mexico with her. Oh, and it also causes a deaf-mute Japanese girl to sexually throw herself at a cop investigating her father. It’ll make sense if you see it, which is nice, since many movies knit like this can be confusing.
The second strand is connected to the title; to put it simply, the lack of common communication—not just in language, but in emotions, needs, desires, and priorities—can cause undue grief and tragedy. There are five languages in this movie: English, Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, and Sign. Just as important, though, there are things that can’t be communicated with words, including sexual angst, loss of loved ones, and several instances of the age-old favorite, guilt. Humanity can be a mess.
The four stories as a single thread are much stronger than any individual part, which is to be expected. There is one, though, that could stand on its own as a full-length feature, since it really is only tangentially related to the rest of the film. This involves Chieko (Rinku Kikuchi, who earned an Academy Award nomination without speaking a word), a deaf-mute Japanese school girl that has never had sex and entices any cute boy with a flash under her panties-free skirts. She’s attention starved in the worst way, obviously, although she begrudges her father for seemingly no reason, even when things become clearer (but not entirely clear) at the end. My favorite scene in the film involves her and a girlfriend drunkenly and druggedly going to a club with some boys and her trying to fit in a situation where she can’t possibly get the full effect; we alternately hear and don’t hear what’s going on. Things don’t turn out well there, so when she gets home she calls a handsome cop who she believes is investigating her mother’s suicide. The movie fittingly ends with her story, since she is the loneliest character and best personifies the idea of disconnect.
None of the other three stories are developed enough to really care about. The story of the Moroccan boys is destined for tragedy from the beginning, even if the pull of the trigger didn’t cause an international incident. The best acting in the movie comes from Adriana Barazza, playing the American couple’s housekeeper and nanny who, after the shooting, is left with taking the Californian children across the border, where they experience authentic Mexican celebration and Barazza can make out with some guy whose wife has been dead for a decade. The moral of this story? If you’re driving drunk across the border at 5am, don’t be an illegal alien. Just saying.
The “Hollywood” factor of the movie is from the American couple, played by Brad Pitt (spending most of the movie yelling at old people on the tour bus) and Cate Blanchett (spending most of the movie barely conscious). Their story starts off promising: they’re attempting to escape a recent tragedy, only to see the rift between them grow with blame and accusation until the bullet threatens to break them up permanently. The rest of their story isn’t much of a story but an exercise in time; their status as Americans both hurt and help them here. In the end, though, it’s just kind of bland.
Obviously, the stories aren’t the most impressive aspects of this movie and seem only tertiary compared to the peripherals. The settings and locales are stunning, from the crowded Tokyo streets to the barren deserts of Morocco and the US/Mexico border. Alejandro González Iñárritu does a great job making segues between stories, with dramatic, parallel cuts. Unfortunately, they come so few and far between that they’re a bit jarring. There are also some nice shots of people crying, but since EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER in this movie cries, something is going to stick. Seriously, I think even the goats shed a tear as they look up at the African sky.
With all the awards hoopla surrounding this movie (it did win the Golden Globe for Best Drama and is nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture), it’s almost required to compare this to last year’s sweetheart, Crash. It is similar for reasons that should be obvious if you’ve been reading. I wasn’t the biggest fan of Crash, but I did care more about the characters during it. Babel is better made, but less visceral.
As I was walking out of the theater, I figured out what bothered me the most, but I couldn’t put it in words. Then, with my nails scratching my head, I looked over and saw the movie poster, and this time what it said to me was the farthest thing from ambiguous. “I AM VERY IMPORTANT,” it screamed. If only I had known when I went in, I could have saved myself some trouble. But I guess that’s the problem with language.
6/10
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