4. Babel: So, unlike The Queen, I don't think its absurd that this was nominated for Best Picture. Once again, this movie was pretty mixed in my mind. Before I get to that, I'm concerned about the growing trend of movies like this. After Crash, the path has been paved for nonsensical, noncontiguous social commentary movies, that just don't make sense as movies. Just because someone can come up with three interesting stories doesn't mean you can combine them into one movie.
So, first, the good. I thought the acting was generally really fantastic. Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Adriana Barazza and "the girl who played the deaf/mute Japanese volleyball player" were all really really great. Also excellent were a number of really powerful and moving scenes. For example, the son turning himself into the police, Brad Pitt trying to pay the guy who helped with this wife, Brad Pitt on the phone with his kids, and a few others were exceptionally well done scenes.
However, the movie suffered from three big problems. The first is what I'll will now call the "Crash/Babel Problem" which shall heretofore be defined as "having a bunch of nonsequitor plot lines with no meaningful relation to each other." Babel took this problem to a whole new level from Crash. The second problem was that the stories also not only had no unifying point but no real point at all. Basically the only underlying current of the movie (as far as I could tell) was that random stuff happens. Third, the movie was too long. Not only that, it felt WAAAAY too long. The last hour moved decently, but the first hour and a quarter was too much nothing. There's only so much not seeing Brad Pitt helped, seeing Japanese girl be frustrated etc... that I really need to buy the storyline.
Overall, good movie, MAYBE good enough to be nominated for best picture in some years. But outside of the acting, the movie probably shouldn't have been nominated.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
The girl's name is Rinko Kikuchi. She actually got an oscar nomination for her performance.
Also, I thought the 'point' of Babel was pretty obvious: it's about the difficulty of living in a world with language barriers. Brad Pitt can't communicate with the locals (or the other tourists, or his wife even); Adriana Barraza (the nanny) has trouble expressing her desires, or talking to the INS; Kikuchi has trouble communicating with anyone.
I thought the problem with the film was twofold: first, as you said, the stories don't really interact very much. I much prefered Inarritu's 21 grams or even Amores Perro's in which separate storylines really worked together to enhance each other.
Second, I thought that while the idea of the film was interesting, it didn't really get developed. It's not like anyone overcomes their language barriers; they're just there and they suck. Brad Pitt gets out of trouble just because the U.S. bullied a helicopter in to rescue him; Adriana, and Rinko's characters don't really make much progress at all.
Finally I'd point out that this is a problem with Inarritu's work uniquely, not with Hollywood in general. His two previous movies have both treated consistent narratives as rather tangential to the whole process of filmmaking, which isn't something I agree with. His films often feature very different storylines, but until now he's succeeded in making them interact in a cool way.
What Hollywood does seem to like are ensemble pieces, with a variety of actors to nominate/please with a trophy. I'd note that of the five BP noms, only one is a strictly one person show (The Queen); the others all feature larger ensembles of actors (Letters From Iwo Jima might be an arguable borderline case). This isn't a recent trend, necessarily - ordinary people beat out raging bull famously in 1981.
Post a Comment