This is a review of Babel (2006)
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1 March
This is a review of Babel (2006)
* Contains some spoilers *
Cinematographically, this film has so much to offer – the variety alone of editing, from conventional montage to cross-cutting to fast-style sequences, promises a lesson in how to make a film that properly uses the natural resources and flexibility of the medium. Or there is Cate Blanchett, showing her class (opposite Brad Pitt**, whose part is more limited and, on immediate sight, played less impressively, although he does bring greater nuance to the intimate scenes) – she evidences why she was heading for all those awards with Blue Jasmine (2013). (Yet we then reasonably ask, on this showing of depth of interpretation, why Blanchett did not get a chance to shine so brightly before being given 2014’s Academy Award (@TheAcademy) and BAFTA (@BAFTA) (except on some conventional notion that you work yourself up from so-called supporting roles, and from nominations for best actress) ?)
That said, Babel (2006) proves to outlive its 143 minutes, and its overly neat wrapping-up and tying-together of the initially disparate strands of Japan, Morocco, and Mexico, skipping between them largely at whim (for, even if one did work out the time-differences, the narrative necessarily dances around in a period of some seven days), leaves one wanting to imagine that its saving grace was parodically being a skit or jam on the principal themes of a range of earlier films from something like Thelma and Louise (1991) to The Sheltering Sky (1990) and even Enter the Void (2009). When doing that, too, it does so delightfully, moving through a range of styles – as well as one moment taking us up close, with a woman (Blanchett) being carried around the narrow, dirt streets of Tarazine by her husband (Pitt), and next giving us an elevated long-view, before, having let us absorb that moment of aloofness, taking us back to something more like a medium shot.
Very promisingly, this use of varying the point of view connotes a thoughtful approach, one that seeks to disengage us from simply submersive uses of the cinematic medium, which can just have us as non-participating, non-questioning consumers of images (and other elements, such as sounds and music)… In the end, though, none of this appearance does amount to fulfilling the initial offer of non-commercial film-making, or, therefore, of being much more than a technical exercise in toto. It is additionally one with diminishing returns, because its underlying story-telling and value-base more and more resemble typical mainstream cinema, not what appeared to be a more unemotional pursuit of using intellect to penetrate how narrative works and persuades.
Thus, one could see its lasting achievement as assuredly in having helped show The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer how to adapt David Mitchell in their film Cloud Atlas (2012), and those film-makers do so with more impact and focus, and less of a pervading sense of banality. So, for example, Jim Broadbent’s (Tim Cavendish’s) strand in Cloud Atlas has variety of light and shade within it, but it does not – any more than, say, does that of Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae and Jim Sturgess) – keep darting around in search of pastiche, whereas this film really does it so much that, by the end, it feels not enlarged as a piece of cinema, but wafer thin. (Except, that is, unless intended as the kind of survey of cinema itself that Holy Motors (2012) was purportedly pleasing us by being ?)
Subverting expectations for the sake of it is one thing, but, when the closing shot came, a clever and daring zoom-out (actually necessarily facilitated by CGI), it was the predictable moment where Babel finally had to conclude, as confirmed by our receding gaze (when we had begun with nothing more than the noise of wind impacting a microphone, a sort of blank slate of the imagination ?) : despite all the artistry of the making, and (fully as importantly) of the unsettling of the status of the story and its telling, it ended with a confirmation of a mundane post-modern world-view.
The suspicion is that it might have been better, if, when screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro González Iñárritu had this idea for a film, they had selected better from other ideas available to them. For the philosophy here is the typically sentimental one that glibly believes that, despite the noise, the signal always has to be there (however faintly), and so it is this kind of signal that (implausibly) brings the father (Jack Hall : Dennis Quaid) to the [rescue of] the son (Sam : Jake Gyllenhaal) in The Day After Tomorrow (2004) via IMDb (@IMDb)] – in the truest tradition of stories of human endeavour (let alone of Lassie Come Home (1943) and its once-popular genre) ! Admittedly, Babel spared us the utter cant that is The Day, whose writers actually seem to believe that showing this individual and isolated familial act of striving for, and of making, a connection brings weight (or relevance) to the massive scenario of geothermal disaster, but it is not altogether so dissimilar :
In essence, Babel appears to make an assertion about the nature of the world and of our interrelatedness, but it is one almost without meaningful moral implications or consequences. For, in one case, we are invited to empathize with Pitt, when he tries to plead with his suffering former fellow coach-passengers to wait in the heat without air-conditioning (amongst them, star-turns such as Harriet Walter and a belligerent Peter Wight), but any rationale either what the coach staying achieves, or why the driver could possibly be so low on fuel that cooling the coach imperils their onward travel, is so inadequately established that it really feels more like Pitt insisting that they all stay because he expects that they would, and so believes that they must: My wife was shot when we were with you, so aren’t we all in this together ?
The artificiality of the reasoning makes that sequence fall wide of the mark, and we are, as with The Day, reduced to the idea of the American man fighting, pioneer style, for his family’s needs again. Fine for him to curse and rant at the locals, but (despite all the film’s seeming objectivity, relativism even, at other times) we have scant perspective on this. Yes, we are given the stereotype, when the coach has gone and the air-ambulance arrived, of the moneyed guy who tries to use cash to show his appreciation – not realizing that it is an insult to the true and genuine hospitality and care that his wife and he have been shown – but does anything hang on this passing gesture of Western imperialism / domination (except, maybe, that he is later kind to someone in relation to his children back home…) ?
By all means, we have the fog of war descending on how both the US government slants its interpretation to report a terrorist act against one of its citizens*** (confusingly, Pitt’s fellow tourists, on a coach registered in Casablanca, are talking about Cairo), and what the outcome of the shooting is reported to be, and we are briefly shown how t.v. in the States milks this story of one of its own, but this is small beer, again made little of except in passing. (Not that it needed hammering home, but hardly a Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum) (1975) here, then… ?) Instead, the film seriously seems to endorse a comforting signal that amounts to the tenets of Six Degrees of Separation (though the 1993 film of that name, which adopted the alleged principle, sounds better than one gave it credit for) or stochastic processes (The Butterfly Effect, so called) to show that, somehow, we all count and are not alone… Or, in two words that served E. M. Forster as a motto (and which T. S. Eliot, his Bloomsbury fellow writer, then appears to have aggrandized ?) :
Only connect
Which brings us back to Cloud Atlas, since it dares to show us people dying for their beliefs, and then being vindicated by the mysterious forces that operate in history – rather than a woman who somehow has to be thought to imagine that (whatever her precise immigration status may be) all is bound to be well, if she crosses the border into Mexico (rather than that her adventures will catch up with her, and will see her deported from her home of sixteen years). Still, at least we see her reunited with her nephew, who has inexplicably escaped the consequences of his dangerous actions****.
The wedding that she first went to Mexico for, just as the larking with the boys and going to the disco in Japan, have a free and celebratory feel, which maybe fits with the end of her story being meant to be inspiring after all ?
In closing, perhaps we might think what other films seem to have learnt from Babel, doing, for example, sustainedly what it found expedient only to do in part : one that may owe a debt is Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), for its uninterrupted moods are there, as if they are oases of tranquillity, created to contrast with the frenetic, and so is its convoy of police vehicles, winding their way across a landscape of features unfamiliar to their drivers.
And, in film, dramatic irony can be used very badly, so that knowing what is going to happen negates the experience of watching (whether the irony arises because the script truly shares knowledge with us that is unknown to others, or on account of our spotting a cue (and realizing its significance in the plot’s direction) that was not intended, and so we foresee an action / revelation). Here, knowing the beginning from the end, makes being with the passengers on the coach a moment that is painfully tense, because we know what will happen – even so, it is a tension that the film keeps, but lets slip away, ending up not holding a candle to equivalent scenes of someone else’s hospitality, in the dark, in The Sheltering Sky.
End-notes
* At one point in Gustavo Santaolalla’s score, one could swear Sting’s ‘How fragile we are’ is quoted (from the album Nothing Like The Sun), whose Latin feel and slow tempo fit the adjacent mood…
** Irritatingly, unless actually to satirize Western media domination and power politics (an interpretation of this film’s aims that seems difficult to sustain with much conviction), Pitt and Blanchett are given star billing (but need they have taken it, and so been given pre-eminence in the cast over equally valuable work by, say, Rinko Kikuchi (Chieko Wataya) or Kôji Yakusho (as her father, Yasujiro ?).
Sad, as using a title such as Babel is so resonant, too… :
* Jorge Luis Borges : ‘The Library of Babel’ (damning the Internet before its invention ?)
* Arthur Koestler : His compendious summing up of his life’s written works, Bricks to Babel
* Book of Genesis : Just nine verses (11 : 1–9) !
* Edmund Sears : ‘It came upon a midnight clear’
*** And, a little ropily (unconvincingly, except for this notion of connectedness (? on which, please see the next paragraph)), that brings in Japan, and the true origins and descent of the offending rifle. The reckless use of the rifle (several other scenes try to capitalize on the theme of the irrational, e.g. the wild drive away from the border control) puts one most in mind either of André Breton’s proposal of the ultimate Surrealist act (or maybe another song of Sting’s**** ?).
And of Yasujiro Wataya’s fond memory of Hassan Ibrahim, and asking after him, that translates into our recollection of his brutal interrogation, which proves the opposite point : the rifle links Japan and Morocco, but the man to whom it had been given is only in our mind…
**** Happy ending ? Well, not exactly, but, then again, we are whisked away, and not invited to consider what befalls someone who gratuitously takes pot-shots that endanger someone’s life, and wounds someone else in a fire-fight with the authorities (even if they do call off the attempt to shoot dead his father, brother and him), or the father who sends them off with the gun, or the man who (illegally) sells it ?
Certainly, it seemed to suit the plot that his brother and he decided to loose off a few rounds, but little else (no more, at any rate, than that business, again plot driven (as was Blanchett’s status of health) with the police checking on the rifle). Getting back to Sting, his song ‘I hung my head’ (from the album Mercury Falling) gave a better account of We wanted to test the rifle in :
I saw a lone rider
Crossing the plain
I drew a bead on him
To practise my aim
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
