Babel

So yeah, I’m actually going to tell you what to think of a film that was nominated for an Oscar. Now that the Oscars are over and it doesn’t matter anymore.

The problem with Babel, I think, is that the director had these three short stories to tell, you know, and he didn’t want to make three little short films because – I don’t know – he didn’t think enough people would see them and appreciate his excellent cinematography and choice of actors and sensitive direction of the said well-chosen actors. And indeed he was probably correct, because I myself have only ever seen one short film, a nice little animated one narrated by Geoffrey Rush that featured a cute animated man who liked to hang around naked and smile.

And so the hodgey-podgey Babel was born. It’s about two young Moroccan boys who are taking pot shots while they mind their family’s goats and end up shooting at a tour bus and severely wounding Cate Blanchett, who is on a vacation with her husband (Brad Pitt) that is supposed to mend their marriage after their newest baby died (crib death) and Brad Pitt, in his soul-crushing grief, temporarily deserted the family. Her getting shot brings them together. It’s sweet. They kiss while she pees in a pan. (I’m sorry. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the pathos of her having these bladder problems while she’s languishing near death in a small Moroccan town and waiting for the US Embassy to get its ass in gear to come and save her. But I couldn’t help it. I snickered.) The US makes a big deal about her being shot by a terrorist and there is a lot of gritty brutality towards the Moroccan villagers, who are all entirely innocent because the whole thing was just two kids messing around with a gun.

Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt have also two (live) children at home in California, being cared for by a devoted Mexican (turns out, illegal immigrant) housekeeper/nanny person called Amelia, and they apparently have no relatives at all because Amelia ends up being forced to take the kids with her to her son’s wedding in Mexico.

Meanwhile, over in Tokyo (I know, right?), a lonely deaf-mute teenager called Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) struggles to come to terms with her mother’s suicide.

It’s not that I’m complaining about any one aspect of the film, although I really did not appreciate watching Cate Blanchett writhe in agony while a local doctor stitches up her shoulder without any anesthesia (at least I think that’s what was happening – I played it in fast motion and thus lost all of the dialogue, so it is marginally possible that the operating doctor said, “Don’t worry, Mr. Pitt, I will give her this leaf to chew on that will cause her to writhe but prevent her from feeling any pain”). The acting was very good all around (they might have given Gael García Bernal more to do). Rinko Kikuchi was as excellent as you’ve heard, really heart-wrenching at times, and I kept hoping the writer would forget he wasn’t writing a soap opera and have her undergo an operation that would give her the use of her ears, poor darling. (He didn’t though.) The cinematography I guess was well-done except that I have to shut my eyes and whimper when the camera gets all shaky for longer than ten seconds, so I missed several whole portions. Nor was it necessary to keep on alternating between the world with sound in it and the world without sound in it while Cheiko was at the night-club. Once or twice, and I promise dude, the audience gets it.

In the end, I think it would have been better for the storylines to have just been thematically linked. Something about human isolation maybe. Because I just really wasn’t prepared for how tenuous the connection between the Tokyo story arc and the Morocco story arc was going to be. Turns out Chieko’s father used to own the gun that ends up making it into the hands of the Moroccan kids. Bit of a stretch to pretend like this is in any way relevant? Well, yes. And sometimes the plot devices are just silly. Like, seriously, there was no one in the entire country to look after the kids for an evening? And seriously, she left them by themselves in a trackless waste and thought she’d be able to find them again easily?

Or, you know, I could just be searching for something to be cranky about as a cover for the thing I am actually cranky about, which is dust. I have contact lenses, so watching all these scenes with the sand and the dust clouds made my eyes water. I was watching nearly the whole film in a blur. I hate grit.