Babel
Having just finished seeing Babel for the first time, I feel compelled to jot down my two cents on the film and hopefully start something of a conversation (argument) about it's successes, failures, merit, etc. Sam, Nell, Mason and Schwarz thought it was excellent, while Logan and a surprising number of people on Rotten Tomatoes thought it was...well...not. I'm with the cool kids; Babel is certainly among the best films of the year.Rather than discuss what I liked about this film, instead I'd like to rant about a couple of recurring criticisms I've encountered. I'll just post a few representative selections here and save myself the trouble of paraphrasing:
...succeeds only in making noise.I think our boy Tommy had a few too many daiquiris before getting to the theater and may have fallen asleep/passed out intermittently throughout the film. Or maybe he's just trying to impress a girl by using the phrase socio-political in his review of a movie that takes place on more than one continent. Maybe he just thinks that any two films with interweaving story lines and brown people are alike. Regardless, Babel is not a film about socio-politics. And Chris, if you need to have your hand held when being brought face to face with subject matter that actually pertains to you, or if you like the take-home-message of a film wrapped up with a nice little little bow, you should probably just stick to documentaries. Or rent Crash. Just don't go anywhere near art. Or Wilco.
-Chris Barsanti, filmcritic.com
If Crash drove you to distraction, then thou best stay away from Babel, this year's towering exercise in socio-political- Thomas Delapa, Boulder Weeklypsycho babble.
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It's pretty -Stephen Hunter, you sir are a -- oh, what's the word? -- douche bag. The connections that unite us as global citizens are neither "silly" nor "little," and I for one found the story not altogether unrealistic. But dude, it's not a documentary, it's a frickin' narrative. And Ed, as far as I'm concerned the comparisons to Crash can stop with your boy Tom and his inability to distinguish between two movies with weavy plots and brown people. As far as you and your impressive position as a Slant Magazine movie critic should be concerned, Crash was a bad movie about tolerance and the socio-economic/racial/cultural divide. But if you'd read some of the commentary from people who actually know what they're talking about, you'd know that Crash doesn't have to do with anything that should show up in this post, let alone any discussion of Babel. And let's just leave any discussion of the character of these two very different films to this.- Stephen Hunter, WashingtonPost.comoh, what's the word? - - stupid in its dramatization of the silly little connections that unite us, and it's somewhat selective in its choice of them.
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Comparisons to Crash are fair only up to a point, given how Babel is prone to sacrificing character at the altar of the almighty shock tactic...
-Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine
Putting children in danger is a cheap way to strike an emotional chord with your audience.And Logan, my beloved roomie; you're not a douche bag, you just have an intellectual-literary chip on your shoulder. Sure, putting kids in danger can be a cheap way to get your readers/views emotionally involved in your story, but it isn't in Babel. It wouldn't detract from the intensity of the various story lines if all the young characters in this movie were 15 years older, and there's no way to meaningfully address the malady of grief in our post post-modern world without depicting the emotional/developmental obstacles children face as members of a "global community." When the kid smashed the gun against the rock, man? Come on! That shit was dynamite. I was never terribly emotionally invested in those two white children, and if you think about it it's pretty clear that Iñárritu didn't want us to get to know them. All we ever knew about those kids was in relation to the nanny. The only time a parent/child relationship has effected me as much as when the nanny was sobbing in the immigration office because she failed to protect--and was being separated from--what felt to her like her own children was when Roberto is finally separated from Giorgio in Life is Beautiful. And that, my friend, is what makes this movie such a masterpiece.
-Paraphrasing Logan
posted by B S Goldsmith at 2/25/2007 01:53:00 AM
9 Comments:
Ben you put me in awkward position.
As I stated before, I love Iñárritu. You can ask Brad -- we were mesmerized by Amores Perros and were eagerly awaiting Babel. If it had won best picture, I would have disagreed with the verdict but been thrilled that Iñárritu was getting some Academy love. But I am genuinely baffled that you were all so taken in by it. Is it a good movie? Sure. Best movie of the year? Not by a long shot. And with your effusive critic bashing, you seem to have forgotten how hard it is to articulate the difference between a good and a great film.
Furthermore, you have had the first say in this argument and you have already framed the debate in a real sinister register: when you critiqued the critics, you didn't actually attack their arguments or defend the movie, you attacked them. Your whole post is a string of ad hominem fallacies. Worse, you take their dislike of the movie as political or cultural ignorance. "Brown people"? That is a low and unnecessary blow. But I guess by forcing people to defend their political positions you save your need to defend your own.
How is Babel not about the socio-polticial? The catalyst gunfire is considered a terrorist act and Amerlia crossing the desert with the two gringo kids is linked through image juxtaposition to Mexicans attempting to border cross everyday. Arriaga conflates the personal/accidental with the political when it suits his thematic needs: Does the fact that the American government finds the gunshot a terrorist act really impact the film on a strictly plot level? Not really. It pushes back Susan's rescue by a couple of hours. But I guess Arriaga needed to hammer home the point that America considers any attack against Americans as terrorism even though it does his movie no service.
And I think this is where the comparisons to Crash come up. Not from the "confusion about two movies with weavy plots and brown people" but from a movie that constructs a narrative from flat characters and tenuous connections to make sweeping thematic gestures. As Ben writes, "I was never terribly emotionally invested in those two white children, and if you think about it it's pretty clear that Iñárritu didn't want us to get to know them." Instead of deconstructing that sentence, I would like to ask Ben the reciprocal question: What characters does Arriaga want us to know and what do we actually know about any of them?
Since you like to quote critics, like me throw down the gauntlet by repeating the words of A.O. "Motherfucker=Redeemer" Scott:
"Perhaps the most common feature of movies of this kind is that they are more interested in fate than in psychology."
A.O. Scott hits the nail on the head. This is not a movie about characters. It is a movie about ideas. And that is why its use of children is so manipulative: because it doesn't earn our emotions, it exploits them.
To further quote A.O. Scott:
"'Babel' is certainly an experience. But is it a meaningful experience? That the film possesses unusual aesthetic force strikes me as undeniable, but its power does not seem to be tethered to any coherent idea or narrative logic. You can feel it without ever quite believing it."
After the movie, Nell commented that Babel was one of the best movies of the year because it is pertinent to the world and times we live in. But when I pressed her on it, she couldn't exactly articulate what that message actually is. Because of Iñárritu's powerful direction the movie certainly feels meaningful without actually containing any meaning.
My counter challenge to you is to try to elucidate the meaning of the film. And, you know, if you want to justify the unnecessary plot strands feel free as well.
P.S. Roberto Benigni sucks.
What unnecessary plot strand? Logan, all you have succeeded in is showing that we, as a blogmunity, don't know if the movie was political vs. emotional or about psychology vs. fate, or whatever.
Dare I say, the film had all these aspects, and more? Was it not also about the relationship between parent (and/or caregiver) and child?
The first reason this movie is great (not good--a distinction you failed to prove otherwise) is its craft. Not since Magnolia have I seen a film so seamlessly weave together multiple plots in a cohesive and elegant way. It was never out of step. Maybe we could have known how the Japan plot tied in a little earlier, but the film didn't suffer because we were left waiting.
You called this "a movie that constructs a narrative from flat characters and tenuous connections to make sweeping thematic gesture." You call Chieko a flat character? Or the two Moroccan brothers? Brad pit is a flat actor, that's his thing. Who else is flat? Tenuous connections are in the eye of the beholder. One could just as easily argue that Matt Damon's girl friend in The Departed being Leo's shrink is a tenuous connection. The fact is, that gun had to come from somewhere, Mexican nannys do have lives on the other side of the border, rich/stupid Americans go on trips to find themselves or clear their heads, etc. Hey, what's a sweeping thematic gesture? Sounds like grad school jargon to me. Do you mean that the film uses its stories to poke at tensions between cultures/countries/family members? Well, what the fuck else should it do? The film is not first about politics, but has clear political undertones throughout. And that's great! It points out the absurdity of Mexican/US border laws and the idiocy of the border patrol while telling a story about people and families living on both sides. You think that's cheap? I think it's smart and subtle, and I know you have an appreciation for this kind of "narrative economy." You said of Children of Men: "The narrative economy in this film is staggering. There is no exposition, no needless plotting. A history of the future is never explicitly stated, but obliquely pieced together through the environmental clues that decorate each frame." Same thing, my man.
You want to talk about cheap tricks to get the viewer emotionally involved? How about United 93--the whole fucking thing. That didnt bother you any, Logan. You said it was the sixth best film of the year. Plus, you said to me last week that you did like Babel, but not as much as Amores Perros or The Three Burials or even 21 Grams. Yeah, I liked Three Burials more than Babel, too, but that doesn't make this a good (not great) film. The point I'm making is that Logan is full of shit and uses rhetoric he learned in his over-education to justify his gut reactions, which are just as fallible as Ben's. It's a cheap trick to make your reader feel intellectually inferior.
Oh please Sam. You are calling me out for using pretentious jargon such as "thematic gestures" when Ben links to a Kristeva essay and says "post post-modern world" in his initial post? Last time I checked you were currently getting over-educated and narrative and themes were terms we learned in high school. I would like to hear Ben say that my language made him feel intellectually inferior. No, seriously. I will stop posting forever. Or at least check all my posts against the Microsoft Word readability test. You just choose the reading grade level, and I will let Microsoft Word prune away.
I have always said I liked Babel, but I was simply surprised that everybody around me was saying it was one of the best movies they had ever seen. And as I said before, Iñárritu is a wonderful filmmaker. But, if you are going to reduce film criticism to gut reactions, then all I can say is that my guy reaction was this film was uneven. The Brad Pitt/Cate Blanchett story line was worthless. The Amelia story line was wonderful until they reached the border and it turned absurd (I guess I am in the minority, but I thought the whole exodus in the desert was a cheap emotional play). Therefore, I liked 2.5/4 stories in the movie. To be a great movie, I need to like at least 2.75/4 of a movie.
"guy reaction"
oy...
You make several valid points: Ben's link to the Kristeva essay was just as bad; I am in the process of getting over-educated (though I like to think of Columbia journalism as more of a trade school); and Ben probably didn't feel intellectually inferior after reading your comment. But I never learned about narrative or themes in high school, and I'll be dammed if you try to tell me otherwise.
I'm not arguing that Babel is one of the greatest movies of all time (I will even say that the desert part was somewhat absurd, though not a cheap trick), but it was absolutely one of the best of the year. And you snubbed it, just like you snubbed my big brother. And the new Rocky.
You know I love Departed, and I feel bad that Scorsese has been snubbed so many times by the academy, but Inarritu directed the hell out of Babel. All I'm sayin' is it deserves a little love. But I should know better that to ask Logan to love something that isnt a Jewish girl with a trust fund in my grandma's basement.
Where do I get this Microsoft Word readability test? Sounds like a time saver...
i don't know who i'm with on this one. babel was disappointing to me, but it was still a pretty damn good film.
i think i'm with logan, but maybe that's just cuz i expected/hoped for more from babel.
the american accusation of terrorism did impact the plot because it shaped the local police's reaction to the shooting and led to the kid gettin' shot.
i think you the message of babel could be that things are always more complicated than our stereotypes and hasty reactions might make them seem.
i also think that the movie is about characters, maybe not in the same way that Titanic is about jack and rose, but about characters nonetheless. it seems like babel tries to give a core sample of its characters rather than the outer layer like many other movies. i think you could even say babel is economical in its character development the same way children of men is in its narrative. although i don't think it's as successful.
to say babel is "one of the best movies of the year" is kinda meaningless though. what's it better/worse than?
inarritu is probably my favorite director working right now. but i think his talent covers up a lot of the weaknesses of babel and would be better spent on a better project.
You are totally right Sam. Babel does deserve a little love, and I was probably unfairly hating on it because it was the front runner for the Best Picture Oscar. Either way, I think is a good call that Iñárritu and Arriaga are parting ways for their next films.
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