"Babel": A Tower of Bombast in Any Language

By Lucia Bozzola, Feb 14, 2007
My mother told me that when she was living in Italy in the late 1950s, one of the favorite pickup lines among Italian men was stating that they read Proust and listened to Wagner. This was supposed to demonstrate their formidable intellect and, thus, their appeal as a superior male. Oh, how times have changed. Anyway, one of the many reasons my mother liked my father was because he did not tell her that he read Proust and listened to Wagner. He didn’t have to. He listened to Miles Davis.

This was one of the many thoughts that popped into my head while watching Babel recently (in between “I’m bored,” “Who’s going to be lethally idiotic in this scene?” and “I shouldn’t have eaten all those fries at dinner”). I wasn’t just amusing myself with a stroll down memory lane, either. The only reason I had gone to see Babel was because it had just been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and as someone who participates in the occasional Oscar pool, I felt the need to see the one Best Pic candidate that I’d avoided. And you know, there’s nothing more depressing than finally seeing a movie you’ve avoided because you think you know what it’s going to be, and it turns out to be precisely what you’d feared. Babel is a movie that reads Proust and listens to Wagner. And no, that’s not attractive.

It’s also not a sign of intelligence. It’s fake brilliance. It’s the blowhard at the cocktail party who tells you he went to college “in New Haven,” because everyone should just know that’s the location of Yale. It’s the Diane Keaton character in Manhattan pronouncing “Van Gogh” like she has a chicken bone stuck in her throat. While such posturing is a mere irritation or fodder for a giggle in daily life, in a movie, it’s lethal. It also seems to be heroin for Oscar voters trying to look smart despite their near complete intolerance for anything genuinely innovative or radical or risky, and their occasionally not-so-secret wish just to be entertained. The Academy screwed itself forever when they got rid of the two de facto Best Picture categories after its first year of giving awards. Had they kept “Best Artistic Quality of Production” as well as “Best Production” (eventually renamed Best Picture) after 1928, movie critics probably wouldn’t be asked, “What’s the worst movie ever to win Best Picture” quite so often. Both Goodfellas and Dances With Wolves could have won, for instance. And this year, a movie that listens to Miles Davis or Eric Clapton or Kurt Cobain or Paul McCartney could win the top prize alongside the Proust-and-Wagner Babel.

Before anyone starts yammering about how those artists do not appear on the soundtracks of Letters From Iwo Jima, The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine, and The Queen, or Babel for that matter, I’m not trying to be literal. It’s just another way of saying that given the choice between (pop) art and Ahhrrrt for their single Best Picture prize, the Academy tends to err on the side of pomposity these days (unless the movie makes over a billion dollars and doesn’t feature Johnny Depp as an alcoholic, sexually ambiguous pirate). And Babel is nothing if not pompous. The title alone is enough to make one run screaming to the soft, straightforward embrace of such titles as, well, Letters From Iwo Jima, The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine, and The Queen. It’s just so symbolic. So deep. Sooo…meaningful. Like Crash. If you’re an ignoramus who doesn’t know the Biblical story about the Tower of Babel, then the title is meaningless. Then again, given that two and a half of the film’s four stories are set in cultures whose primary religious text is not the Judeo-Christian Old Testament, it would appear that choosing said title is another act of precisely the kind of Western cultural deafness that the film so adamantly deplores. Oops.

Nevertheless, even if it were called Shit Happens, it would still be insufferable. That’s a shame, because as virtually all of the critics, con and pro, have observed, director Alejandro González Iñárritu has talent to spare. Babel looks and sounds fabulous, and the performances have an intensity the schematic roles don’t deserve. Is the ham-fisted edification screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga’s fault, then? He certainly deserves some blame, but his non-Iñárritu collaboration The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada showed that believable, complex life could be breathed into his characters. No, it’s the Iñárritu-Arriaga combination that’s toxic, and their current beef with each other over who is the true author of Babel sounds like a petulant battle over who has the bigger…genius. Here’s an idea: stop working together, and see who creates the better film.

Here’s another idea: tell the story in order and see if it still works. No, I never found Babel’s fractured, globe-trotting time structure confusing. I knew that as sure as somebody would misunderstand or ignore somebody to obnoxious and/or horrific effect every five minutes, I’d eventually see Brad Pitt’s end of his teary phone call home to the angelic children and saintly Mexican housekeeper in San Diego. I understand why Iñárritu and Arriaga get all fancy with their plot time. How else could they overload the climax of the film with so much pain and suffering? (In case it wasn’t already clear from the first two hours that We’re All Doomed — except for the cute American children and their pretty absentee parents. Tsk, tsk, isn’t that just always the way?). Slicing and dicing stories is also a potentially effective means for hiding the fact that a lot of what goes on is overblown and preposterous. Everyone seems to have an uncanny talent for saying or doing precisely the wrong, moronic thing in every single situation, whether it’s the Moroccan father sending his boys out with a bazooka of a rifle they can’t handle, Cate Blanchett asking for non-fat food and Diet Coke in a country that clearly doesn’t have the luxury of indulging in American dietary nonsense, or the housekeeper getting into a car with her snockered, volatile nephew. It would be very easy to think that Babel is really about the tyranny of fools.

But, oh, it’s not. How do I know? Rinko Kikuchi. Because really, three stories about disconnection through bad communication aren’t enough to make the point that we all should really, truly listen to each other. You need a deaf mute Japanese girl with underwear issues as well. You need a deaf mute Japanese girl going commando who has nothing to do in and of herself with the other three tightly connected stories. (I know, dad gave the Moroccan guy the gun — why, that’s not contrived at all.) Is there a better way to show the negative effect of not being able to hear what people say than having a character who can neither hear nor speak? Why, no. Have other filmmakers made better movies about the strange solitude of over-crowded, over-stimulating Tokyo even for people who can hear and speak? Um, yeah. Now, the sleek, neon-lit, high-tech contours of Tokyo certainly do stand in distinct metaphorical contrast to the dirt and dust of Morocco and Mexico. But so does Brad Pitt’s luxurious house in San Diego. That visual point is made before we get to Tokyo, making this a rare case where Japan isn’t worth the trip. As much as I enjoyed looking at Tokyo, I would have preferred to have that half hour of my life back instead of being told yet again that global ignorance is bad and parents need to take care of their children.

Granted, no one can say for certain (except for those Price-Waterhouse guys) who will win the Best Picture Oscar until the envelope is actually opened. The writers, actors, producers, and directors guilds have been showing the love only to Little Miss Sunshine and The Departed. Who knows? Maybe this year the Academy will reward a film that has something to say about ignorance or families or violence, but in a context where cool, snappy entertainment takes precedence over self-important, utterly humorless sanctity. I’m not too confident about that, though. I’ve been carefully listening to the Academy for a long time — and I keep hearing Wagner when I’d rather have Miles Davis.