Babel is about a bunch of people who don’t know each other and all have their own problems but their lives are curiously intertwined… blah blah blah. This is kind of a formula for Hollywood-movies-which-ought-to-win-some-Oscars, which includes Magnolia and Crash and others. I’m not really into this. Babel also falls into a vein of movies that try to find a new, modern approach to the tragic, but are really pathetic.
There is a series of sad accidents and events by people who might have meant well or didn’t know any better, but were, unfortunately, screwed. Some dumb boys shot at a bus and nearly killed a lady; the police fire at those two boys and kill one of them; a woman’s asshole son almost killed her and the kids she was babysitting; and a Japanese teenager is depressed. None of these characters are especially admirable or despicable. Maybe the theme is that we’re all on this Earth together, and we’re all different, and bad things happen to everyone, and we just gotta pick ourselves up and keep going and do our best. Blach! This message is too soft! There’s nothing good here! This is pathetic!
I think this movie is supposed to make you feel interested and international and empathetic to the plight of all people. The shots that set the scene at a Mexican wedding or in a small Moroccan village are too long. The long shots over Tokyo are barely justifiable. The camera has this drowsy, surveying eye that doesn’t stop for anything special. “Look at the people…” For balance, half of the characters are rich enough so we kind of check out their nice living rooms, but not rich enough for the filmmakers to make a point of it.
The best characters are the kids. The little Bambi-eyed sharpooter was really interesting, and I think he hit the jackpot when he walked down the hill and surrendered to the police and took responsibility for everything. The little blond boy got this special moment when he watched the movie’s best villain decapitate a chicken right in front of him, and later in the desert protested in a bizarrely adult voice to his babsitter, “I’m not staying here alone!” This was cool.
It was a fun movie to watch at certain points, especially in the first half. There are a lot of emotional moments, like when you watch the Moroccan boys raise the gun towards the distant tour bus. “Oh no, no, no…” you think, and they shoot, and the bus just keeps going. And then the bus… stops. The kids freak out and you freak out watching it! In addition to the thrilling bits, the movie nicely pulls you into a subdued empathy with most of its characters’ problems. There’s a careful pace to the revelation of each of the four stories’ time and their relationships to the others. But, like I said, the point they serve is, in the end, such a dull theme.