Babel

As I write this, Babel is nominated for Best Picture of the Year, and is considered a favorite. (It won the “Golden Globe,” right? And that’s a really, really good indicator, right? Not!!!) As I write this, we have seen four of the nominees, all of them except Letters From Iwo Jima, and I hope to see that soon. And as I write this, my own choice for the Oscar is Little Miss Sunshine.
I frankly didn’t get this movie. It is a matter of the individual parts being a whole lot better than the sum of the parts. It is beautiful, the acting is great (particularly by Rinko Kikuchi as a deaf-mute Japanese teenager), and each of the four stories is compelling.
1. A goat-herder in Morocco buys a rifle to kill jackals. His sons, fooling around, shoot and injure …
2. An American woman who is in a bus with her husband. Her life hangs by a thread, while back at home …
3. Their Mexican illegal housekeeper/babysitter defies the husband’s order to stay with their two young children at home, and instead takes them to her son’s wedding in Mexico, with near-disastrous results. Meanwhile, back in Tokyo … (huh?) …
4. A beautiful young deaf girl struggles with her mother’s recent suicide, and her need to be loved and accepted manifests as promiscuity and exhibitionism …
Huh? Where does that last thread come from? Well, it’s not much of a secret, so I’ll tell you. Her father gave the gun to the Moroccan goat-herder …
You will of course be reminded of Crash, last year’s Oscar winner (which I loved), in that various threads tie together in unlikely ways. But where Crash had a theme of cultural misunderstandings and racism of all kinds and the horrors it can unleash by pure accident, Babel seems to flounder. The title implies a failure to communicate, but I don’t see that very strongly in evidence, except for the Japanese girl who so desperately wants to communicate with her hearing peers. It all seems random, and if that is the intent, it’s not enough for me.
I must stress again, each of these four stories is gripping in itself, with the Japanese story the strongest and the story with the biggest stars, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, the weakest. It’s just that none of them seem to belong in the same movie. This made a lot of people angry. I wasn’t angry, so much as disappointed that it didn’t manage to add up some something greater than the sum of its parts.