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Babel – communication let me down
This film is one of the Best Film Oscar nominees – others being The Departed, Letters From Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen. The trailer for Letters From Iwo Jima ran before Babel came on and 2-minutes of hearing Japanese hurtling from THX made my ears hurt, so I won’t be seeing Clint’s movie.
DANGER! DANGER! WILL ROBINSON…SPOILERS AHEAD!
Wow..what can I say about Babel. You either love or hate it. You either get it or you regret spending two and a half hours getting leg cramps. Babel is about not being able to communicate on different levels, in different cultures and circumstances. So we have four stories in Mexico/US, Japan and Morocco where the characters are somehow linked.
There is an American couple (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) who is in Morocco trying to save their marriage while their two children are being looked after by a Mexican nanny who brings them across the border because she has to return home for her son’s wedding but couldn’t find anyone to look after the kids. Cate Blanchett’s character gets shot by a Moroccan boy who was fooling around with a rifle which his father traded from another herdsman to protect his goats from jackals. That herdsman received the rife as a gift from a Japanese tourist for whom he acted as a local guide. The Japanese tourist has a problematic teenage deaf-mute daughter whose mother killed herself.So there are relationship troubles where the American couple are trying to communicate with each other in an effort to save their marriage, there are language barrier problems in trying to get help in a foreign land when the American woman gets shot. Even fellow Americans in the tour bus are unwilling to wait around till help arrives – they want to get to get out of the desert heat and to an aircon hotel – they drive off leaving the American couple in the small village in the middle of nowhere.
The Mexican nanny is unwittingly thrown into circumstances where she loses the two children in the desert and gets deported even though she built a life for herself in the US for 16 years. The Japanese teenager who presumably is traumatised by her mother’s suicide could not communicate with her father, not only because she is deaf-mute, pours her heart out in a note to the policeman investigating the origins of the rifle involved in the Morocco shooting is perhaps the most powerful story in Babel.
There are many implausible scenarios which leaves one flabbergasted at the sheer stupidity of people and situations but apparently the people who nominated this film for an Oscar did not have any issues. Some of the more glaring ones:
1. An American couple chooses to go to a faraway land to try and save their marriage while leaving their two small children in the care of a nanny who is an illegal alien.
2. Moroccan police open fire at 2 young boys without any attempt to speak to them first.
3. The nephew of the Mexican nanny leaves his aunt and 2 small children in the middle of the desert in pitch black darkness with just a torch. He says he would come back for them – how would he even know where he left them?
4. The Japanese girl is really quite annoying and it’s hard to empathise with her.
Ok…so that last one was just something personal but I did feel the movie was a tad draggy although it kept my attention pretty much. Overall, if you liked Borat, don’t see Babel.
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