Babel

So I haven't written any reviews in about six months. Yeah, sorry. I just found what I'd written already pretty lame, and that I also saw very few movies that really needed reviewing all that desperately. (Look at my two reviews of "The Best of Youth," after all.) But I've been thinking about writing some more reviews, and even though I saw this one back in March, it's still fresh enough in my mind that I can write about it.

"Babel" was, as you probably know, a movie that was nominated for several Oscars. I've seen three of the movies nominated for Best Picture this last year, and I am just completely dumbfounded. "The Queen" was all right, but not the absolutely great film people seemed to think. (And for all the hype about Helen Mirren's performance, I didn't really notice it all that much. Now, Michael Sheen as Tony Blair? That was an amazing performance.) "The Departed" felt like a routine cops-and-gangsters film, nothing more. Argue all you want about how it has hidden themes, but usually, there needs to be something about those themes that people can notice.

"Babel," however, is the worst of the lot. I won't go so far as to call it terrible; if I know one thing from hanging out on a forum dedicated to terrible movies, it's that what I think is terrible is quite honestly much better than most direct-to-video monster films. But "Babel" is pretty much a big mess.

It's the story of, well, nothing that I can really tell. That's partly because of the multiple-storyline thing, a premise that really shouldn't be used unless you have a good reason for it. It seems to me like some kind of result of our ADD culture; we can't have just one good story anymore, so we'll take four or five mediocre stories. Hearing that the director of Babel (Alejandro Gonzalez Innarito) has used this for his previous two films, "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," makes me wonder if he's a one-trick pony. I haven't seen either one, and to be perfectly honest, "Babel" makes me want to stay away from them.

But the mess can't really be blamed on the multiple storylines. It should be blamed on the lack of coherence. I'm not going to say that if you use multiple storylines, you should make a good point; "Intermission" didn't make any real point with its various storylines, but it managed to be a good time nonetheless. "Babel," on the other hand, has pretensions of being Art, and it just doesn't work.

Let's look through the stories themselves: An American couple is arguing, but is brought together by the wife being shot. Two brothers (the ones who shot the woman, not really intending to do it) end up feeling guilt over her "death." The couple's children are taken into Mexico illegally, get culture shock, and then end up in the desert. And finally, a Japanese girl feels horny.

The stories on their own might make for a good film, but again, they're supposed to make A Statement About Our World. And that statement is... totally lost on me. Okay, reading about the movie later, I know it's supposed to be about borders and language and all that jazz, but the film doesn't seem to make a point about it. It just says, "Hey, you know how borders and language are impeding us?" and then doesn't really give any solutions or insights.

Worse yet is that if it's talking about borders and language, it seems it wants to shoot itself in the foot. If language is an impediment of some sort, then why do the American kids speak Spanish? Why does the American couple have a translator? If it's supposed to be about borders, what kind of borders do those Middle Eastern kids have to deal with? And the Japanese schoolgirl subplot could've been tossed out for all it does for the film; by the end, I was wondering if maybe the director put it in because he has a fetish for Japanese schoolgirls.

The film also seems to want to be a Topic of Conversation, and thus tries several attempts at starting conversations in coffeeshops. (Warning: Spoilers herein.) There's the third-act revelation that the American kids' story and their parents' story don't happen at the same time. The revelation affects nothing about either one of them. There's a note written by the Japanese schoolgirl that we don't get to find out the contents of. It feels like an afterthought more than an organic extension of anything. The one link between the Japanese plot and everything else is that the schoolgirl's father sold a gun in Middle East-land, which fell into the hands of the kids who shot Cate Blanchett. Now, really, when you're watching the plot about kids shooting a woman, you don't need to know how the guy who sold their father the gun came into possession of it; you need to know what unfolds because of their shooting. So we're getting a bunch of scenes that could've been cut out. Are you taking notes?

The thing that really got me about the film was its Oscar nominations. Why? There weren't any better movies to highlight? (Then again, they nominated "Little Miss Sunshine," so maybe they weren't paying much attention.) I mean, I can't say I've seen a bunch of 2006 movies, but "Babel" is feeble compared to "Stranger than Fiction" or "The Fountain." If they nominated "Babel" because it was trying to say something, why not nominate "The Fountain," which also tried to say something, and managed to be more entertaining and thought-provoking?

In the end, "Babel" felt like it wanted to say something, but it wasn't speaking my language. Which is ironic, to the say the least.