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Babel November 19, 2006 |
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Despair, it can be a wonderful emotion when dished out in small proportions, a reminder that most things come equally bad as they do good, but when doled out in heaps, with unrelenting detail paid to the darkest of situations, without much room for positive reinforcement, it can be a real drag. In referring to the recent big screen epic from the gifted Spanish director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, “Babel”, a film spanning four separate groups of people on two separate hemispheres, I’m inclined to overuse the word because the story is nothing but, and two and a half hours of it is enough to make the happiest of fellows a mumbling wreck of frustration and anguish. That being said, and I really can’t stress enough how unapologetically depressing the four stories that make up the film’s sprawling narrative actually are, in relation to a normal drama which may cut its heaviness with a small dose of levity, the film does offer up a master class in screenwriting and storytelling, masterfully connecting the four threads with the tiniest of coincidences and making it feel as seamlessly connected and singularly important as the title makes it biblically symbolic and thematically ominous. If you can get over the depressing subject matter, and it’s not easy given that the director never relents in dragging his unsuspecting characters through a political, personal, and multinational hell, the craftsmanship with which the story is constructed, by Inarritu and his writing partner Guillermo Arriaga, is stunning in it’s scope yet still intimate enough to let each individual tragedy run its course without taking away the overall effect of the unconventionally jumbled whole. It’s a big, expansive, expensive bowl of emotional confusion, personal anguish and national alienation, and though it may not be as hard hitting as the writers’ two previous efforts, “Amores Perros” and “21 Grams”, it is weighty material that can’t help but draw you in with it’s interconnected threads, beautiful landscapes, intimate portraits of inoffensive lost souls, and a despair factor that, while off-putting, makes for some harrowingly emotional payoffs. To give away how the four stories are ultimately connected narrative-wise wouldn’t be fair, but any brief rundown of the plot would naturally have to come with a few descriptive liberties in giving an understanding of the way in which the threads bond. We’ll start, like the movie does, on a mountain field in Egypt, where two innocent young brothers, on break from shepherding goats for their father, practice shooting coyotes with their newly bought rifle. Unconvinced that the rifle has a long distance range, the older brother dares the naïve younger brother to shoot at a tour bus in the distance, where, a few scenes later, we see the resulting bullet enter the shoulder of American tourist Susan (Cate Blanchett), whose frantic husband Richard (Brad Pitt) is at a loss for what to do in the middle of a foreign mountain range with no hospitals for hundreds of miles. Conversely, on the other side of the world, the American’s children are put into the hands of their loving nanny Amelia (Adriana Barraza) who has to bring them across the Mexican border to her son’s wedding, a complication that leads to INS problems that never would have been addressed had the parents gotten home on schedule, if not for that random bullet which, back in Egypt, has the two brothers and their poor father running from the police who think their terrorists. And finally, completing the arch of misunderstanding that drives the story, we get to know Japanese teenager Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) in Tokyo, where her handicap as a deaf mute alienates her from the opposite sex, causing much pain and frustration as she stubbornly begins to experiment, unsuccessfully, with the potentials of her sexuality. Just how the story of a lonely Japanese teenager and her equally lonely widowed father (played by the Japanese star Koji Yakusho) relates to the stories in Egypt and Mexico is the film’s ultimate secret, one that doesn’t hit as hard as it should, but one that ultimately makes the storytelling approach successful, both thematically and symbolically. What Inarritu and Arriaga are trying to say with this rambling concoction of misunderstanding and frustration is that, in any language, when situations get misconstrued and ideologies are upset, tragedy isn’t too far behind. In Egypt, what seemed like an innocent day in the field for two brothers, and a nice vacation for a burned out American husband and wife, turns into a nightmare that has the poor natives wanted fugitives and the tourists lost and scared on unfriendly, unrecognizable land, where even their own embassy has a hard time clearing the red tape to rescue them. In Japan, the dire frustration Chieko feels about her handicap, and how it leads to her alienation from the boys she likes, results in angry depression and dangerous sexual experimentation that only results in more embarrassment and pain, while in Mexico, poor Amelia, who was only doing what was best for the young children of her employers, winds up broken and sobbing to an unforgiving INS agent after her no-good nephew gets them in hot water with the border guards. This is all hard to handle, especially the plight of the characters in Mexico and Japan, as Amelia and Chieko, played so brilliantly by Barraza and Kikuchi, both who deserve Oscar consideration, are the easiest to relate to, and serve as surrogates for the audience’s own feelings of misplacement at being helpless witnesses of such mind-boggling desperation, but because we do have those relatable types on the screen to both root, and feel for, the weighty task of living through “Babel” without going crazy is that much more lighter, and finally, that much more agreeable. Inarritu’s film is complex and frustrating, to say the least, but its brilliant concept and seamless storytelling, and a few choice performances from some hugely talented actors, makes it one of the year’s most interesting pictures, hit or miss. “Babel” is playing at the Quaker Crossing Cinema in Orchard Park. by Adam Suraf
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