Babel
How a naked Japanese schoolgirl can make you cringe, or Why Academy voters are killing me (for the second year in a row).
Now that the Oscars nominations have been announced, there’s really no more avoiding the topic of Babel. I saw it two and a half months ago, and I meant to blog about it right after. And then a little while after that, I decided that too much time had passed. But I can see now that I’m going to have to go on record defending my claim that this was the Worst Movie of the Year.
I didn’t go into Babel expecting to hate it. But by the time that Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett were being helicoptered away from those brown people and their warm Coca Cola, I found myself silently rooting for their helicopter to please, please crash, get shot down, something. Part of this was because the script was so amazingly bad (Border agent to nanny sin papeles: “They are not your children. Plus you’re in this country illegally.”). Most of it was because of the truly offensive nature of the movie.
Babel was nothing more than very beautifully shot, reasonably well acted porn. Suffering porn. Watch all of these people suffer, Iñárritu tells us; feel good that you’re not one of them. Ah, but aren’t we? we’re to ask. Isn’t Iñárritu saying that we are all connected, whether in joy or suffering?
That is what he seems to be saying, and it’s a great thesis for a political film. (True, too, but that’s neither here nor there.) The problem is that Babel undercuts its own claim to be political.
Babel has all of the trappings of a political film: the hotbutton locations, the conflicts, the nationalities. Witness: Rich Americans vacationing in war-torn north Africa. Poor Moroccans struggling to eke out a living under a brutal government. A nanny in Southern California, here illegally, trying to cross the border. All right, you might say, rubbing your hands together, as the lover of political cinema that you are, All right, bring it on.
But all of that setup is just a tease. The movie has no politics at all, it turns out. None of the horribleness that befalls everyone in this movie (and there’s quite a bit of horribleness) stems from any identifiable political cause. What then causes all of the suffering that we’re forced to endure? Interpersonal misunderstandings and accidents are the problems, not political, economic or structural conflict. The movie is called ‘Babel’ after all, and it is saying, in the most wide-eyed and simple-minded way imaginable, “If only we all spoke the same language then we would have no conflict.” In this way, Babel is basically just Crash with subtitles. (Babel = Volcano minus volcano plus subtitles?)
That Babel has a serious chance of winning Best Picture, just one year after Crash took that honor, should depress the fuck out of all of us. (If, you know, anyone — besides Jeopardy contestants — really cares about the Oscars.)
(If the Academy really wants to make it up to us for last year, they’ll have to not only give Best Picture to Little Miss Sunshine, but they’ll drag Iñárritu into a screening room and make him watch Soderbergh’s Traffic until his eyes bleed.)
4 comment(s):
Soderbergh's Traffic? Was that the one where the white heroine's depth of druggy descent was signified by having sex with a black man? Or was that the one where the DEA agent crumpled up his notes and gave a speech that came straight from the heart?
By
Josh K-sky, at
3:00 PM
Although I now appreciate that you were paraphrasing yourself from when you wrote, "Someone please lock Paul Haggis in a room with Thom Anderson until only one comes out alive."
By
Josh K-sky, at
3:05 PM
Yeah, I knew I should have qualified that comment.
I didn't cite Traffic because I thought it was a great film (though I think I probably liked it better than you did). I cited it because it was a successful example of what Babel wanted to be: a multi-layered story showing real connections in a complex web. And making a real political argument. Any offensiveness in Traffic lay in the filmic conventions (as you cite), not in moronic analysis.
Babel wanted to do this, but the connections among the players were only on the surface, and the political analysis was absent.
For my purpose here, whether or not Traffic was good is beside the point. It's enough that it was coherent.
By
Jon Z, at
3:10 PM
They should make him watch the original Traffic miniseries. Much better than the Soderbergh version.
By
Antid Oto, at
10:19 AM
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