Babel, and why it's way worse than Crash

Babel is an attempt at an international version of Crash in which a group of intercontinental characters are all loosely connected through fateful events, but all suffer as a consequence of fate and the harsh realities of the real world.  As the title hints, it uses language as a means to show division between people and cultures.  However, despite its clever premise and lofty aspirations, Babel falls flat due to a disconnected, meandering story, impersonal characters, and extreme melodrama.

The story is a mess.  It jumps around amid three places and groups of people:  Morocco, Japan, and California/Mexico.  In order to show simultaneous suffering that does not happen sequentially, the film shows these three stories that occur at different points in time as if they are occurring simultaneously.  Even by the end of the film, I wasn’t quite sure what the timeline was. 

Further, the three stories drag on too long and are quite unrelated (even the common theme of communication isn’t common as there’s no language barrier in the U.S./Mexico story, just prejudice).  Where Crash is successful, is in not hanging around too long in a scene unless something very dramatic is happening, and even then it moves quickly.  Babel, contrarily, indulges in countless, documentary-style, unnecessary establishing shots for EVERY scene that just slow the entire pace of the movie down to a crawl.  Further, the film lingers with one story for way too long so that when the film cuts back to another of the three stories, it takes us (the audience) out of the film because we’ve been engrossed in the other story for so long.  There is no sense that these three stories are all working collaboratively towards some similar, relevant conclusion as in Crash, rather, it seems like there are three, disconnected short films being jammed all into one using the cliché theme that “the world’s a cruel place” as the excuse for doing it.

Now, a big reason it is easy to criticize the story is because we (the audience) have no rooting interest in its characters.  Keeping with the Crash comparison, the (only) reason Crash is such a great film is because it saved the cat… a lot.  “Save the cat” is a term coined by screenwriter Blake Snyder and it refers to a scene or part of a scene in which the (main) character or hero/heroine does something endearing (like saving a cat) that defines the character and also gives us reason to like him/her.  Some examples from Crash are the racist cop (Matt Dillon) helping his father to the toilet in the middle of the night and the locksmith (Michael Pena) giving his young daughter the invisible, impenetrable cloak. We see these scenes and we think, “Oh, Matt Dillon is such a pr**k because he’s up all night helping his dad deal with his enlarged prostate” and “That locksmith isn’t a gang banger, he’s just a hard working father trying to provide the best for his family”.  In other words, we’re hooked. We care what happens to these characters now.  In Babel, there’s no trace of saving the cat, which makes it difficult for us (the audience) to care about any of the characters because the film is too busy juggling three stories.  Further, all the characters are markedly flawed to the point that the tragedy that befalls them is less tragic because their issues, to some degree, cause it:  the Moroccan boy is dumb, his father is negligent, the Mexican nanny is weak-willed and cracks under pressure, her nephew is brash, sarcastic, and drives drunk, the Japanese girl is a weird sexual deviant, her father is negligent, Brad Pitt is aloof, and Cate Blanchett is arrogant.  I’m not saying characters shouldn’t have flaws, but they should have redeeming qualities, shouldn’t they?  As the story progresses, we see some of those redeeming qualities, but not enough to outweigh the flaws that got them into this mess in the first place (except for with Pitt and Blanchett, but their story is so stagnant that it is boring- they literally sit in the same place doing nothing for the majority of the second half of the film.)

 

Some films such as This Is Spinal Tap are dubbed mockumentaries because they use a fictitious story in a documentary-style to make fun of documentaries. Well, I would call Babel a melomentary because it uses a fictitious story in a documentary-style to dramatize a news story they couldn’t get actual footage for and never happened.  The film tries so hard to be poignant and dramatic in every scene that it smothers you (and smothers you without you having a rooting interest in the characters).  What’s worse, in doing so, when the final, really dramatic scenes present themselves, they just get lost in the fold as another melodramatic scene instead of standing out as the climax of the rising action.

This film has a good premise, but comes across as a haphazard splicing of three short stories.  It isn’t really worth checking out unless you are the type that really wants to fight for the cause and are already incensed at the happenings of the world (and the U.S.’s activities therein).

If you like this (or want a better film), check out:  Crash (Widescreen Edition)

Scale: 

1-  Lots of Better Movies at Blockbuster   

2-  Might Be Worth Renting If You’re Bored

3-  Rent It When You Get to It

4-  A Must Rent, at some point

5-  Put It in Your Queue NOW!

My Rating: 1

Buy Babel