Another day, another movie. It took us two days to watch it on the train because Babel, the Brad Pitt / Kate Blanchett vehicle, is two and a half hours long (whew). For two very positive things, let me say that it was never boring and that the cinematography is simply stunning. The score is a bit intrusive and harsh, but I think that was intentional, almost part of the film's landscape. It is directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and written by Guillermo Arriaga with a complex narrative that's really the most interesting part of the film for me.

I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll just say what we know at the outset. There are four groups of people in four parts of the world, all of whom will effect each other in some way before the movie ends. There's a white-bread California couple with two ultra-blond perfect little children; there's their attentive Latina housekeeper/nanny and, eventually, her boisterous family; there's a handsome Japanese businessman and his wildly hormonal adolescent daughter; and there's a Moroccan herder family with two young and obstreperous sons. I've heard it said that Iñárritu's 'cause' is exploring families and the relationships in them, which is certainly the pivotal aspect of this film, perhaps more so than the talked-about cultural and political issues.

It helps to know that the storyline is not told entirely linearly. Some events happen as you see them but some turn out to have happened before and/or after others, and it's a bit confusing until you sort it out. What is kind of cool is that a rifle connects all these disparate people in their very far-apart places. This conceit is often used to good effect (The Red Violin was a good recent example) but I think Babel gets a bit carried away with it. I mean, why not track down the manufacturer of the bullets or the steel, or the woodsmen who chopped down the trees whose wood was used on the rifle's back?

The efficient and basically kind Moroccan doctor seems the only character who embodies what I would like to think was the whole point. He almost managed to make me overlook plot inconsistencies, visible boom-mikes, star-turn camera shots of Pitt and Blanchett, insanely bad judgment decisions by many (most) of the characters, and the oddly unfinished endings of at least three plot lines (to be discussed in comments if anyone who's seen it wants to). Babel burbles with too much anger at authority figures and is too willing to engage in and display both cruelty and egotism to do it, but there IS an effective case to made that the globe has become very small and that we should work on maintaining our cultural differences without allowing them to interfere with our human and humane needs and feelings.

Labels: movies, reflections