Babel
Also reviewed by:
Thomas J.
Man, it feels like it has been years since I’ve seen a truly great film. As you can see by flicking through my old reviews, I’ve seen quite a few good films, a couple of really good films, and enjoyed a bunch of mediocre flicks among dozens of turds, but I can’t recall the last time I was absolutely blown away by a movie.
Babel should have been the one to break the drought. It’s is precisely the sort of film I should love. I really fucking dig the director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, and his body of work so far (Amores perros blew me away, and 21 Grams was a sober but damn compelling film), and rejoice at the idea of big budget films made with arthouse sensibilities making it in widespread release and getting the kudos they deserve.
Everyone seems to love it too. Reviewers gushed, friends raved. But I just didn’t feel it. A lot of it left me really cold.
I can’t figure out if it’s a case of me not completely getting it, or maybe another occurrence of the public suddenly and frustratingly embracing a film by a director whose past works have seemed blindingly superior (I still can’t grasp why everyone went nuts for David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive). And it annoys me that I didn’t love it. Hell, at times I scarcely even liked it.
Babel is comprised of several storylines linked in one way or another, but more strongly linked thematically. There’s Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as tourists abroad thrown into a terrifying situation made more scarily frustrating by the difficulty of finding help in a strange land, a land where a local family is torn apart when two young boys toy around with their new gun to devastating results. Then back home in the USA Pitt and Blanchett’s children are taken across the border to a Mexican wedding by their nanny, which for all the culture shock they experience only takes a turn for the worse when they try returning home again. And lastly we have a deaf mute Japanese girl who tries to use sex to connect to the rest of the world around her.
That the stories are not as obviously linked as in his other work was a big factor in my disappointment – how he reveals the link to the Japanese story is badly strained at best. Sure, there are themes of death, isolation and communication running through all the stories here, but they are themes so massively broad that instead of being a attention demanding two-and-a-half hours Babel may as well have been an eighty hour film with thirty-three different tales set in twenty-eight different countries, or it could have been an hour-and-a-half long film with a few less stories and still made the same point.
While I was watching Brad Pitt’s growing frustration at not being able to get his wife help in a foreign country the film had me in it’s grip - but then we’d cut to a Mexican wedding party for twenty minutes and my focus would completely dissolve. There’s little doubt this film is bloated – while it is filled with some really great scenes, and benefits from great acting almost throughout, there are handfuls of other scenes and moments that seem to serve very little purpose, and I’d love to hear justification for their inclusion.
The director's style also seems to have mellowed a bit from the searing Amores perros, and with the exception of the affecting scenes showing us the silent world of the Japanese girl (which let’s face it, isn’t the most original or difficult thing to pull off) I was never actually awed by his visual sense - just another thing that let me down.
So are recent movies by interesting artists not reaching the heights they once did, or am I just getting harder to please?