Babel - My Thoughts

After a restful night, and then a lovely afternoon at the beach with my girlfriend, I headed over to the Century City movie theatre to take a look at Babel - a movie that is the exact opposite of a restful night and a lovely afternoon at the beach with a beautiful girl.

Babel is the newest opus from Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, director of Amores Perros and 21 Grams. Having never seen any of Inaritu's work, and basing my anticipation on commentary from many friends that all sounded basically like, "His shit is so depressing it will make you rethink whether or not you want to inhabit planet earth anymore," I waited uncomfortably for the film to begin. Perhaps I'm a sissy, perhaps I'm too sensitive, but I have avoided movies like 21 Grams, Amores Perros, Requiem for a Dream etc. because the ugliness of life presents itself on a daily basis and I don't really need it reaffirmed over a bag of popcorn.

That said. I am glad I went to see Babel.

In what I am told is typical Inarritu fashion, Babel follows the intersecting lives of a number of characters stretched all across the globe. The mindless shooting of an American woman in Morocco is the film's catalyst, but her struggle to survive is just one of many life altering circumstances explored in the film. Inarritu's piercing camera takes on heavy subjects from the timely: immigration, nationalism, globalization to the dark and taboo: crib death, incest, suicide.

After leaving the film I grappled with what I thought the film was "about." What the story ultimately was trying to prove. Did it have an underlying thesis? A theme? After further thought, I'm not sure that it matters.

Last year's "Best Picture" Crash, using a similar narrative construction painted a clear picture of dysfunctional race relations in Los Angeles. Here the theme was obvious: race relations are all fucked up and there's nothing we can do about it. Period. My problem with Crash, however, was that it presented all of these problems, the problem of race relations in America and offered little or no solution to these problems. The screenwriters of the film have responded to similar complaints stating that this was their intention. To me, this is where Crash fell short.

With Babel, Inarritu certainly paints our world with a dark brush, but the moments when the film really pulls you in are when he pokes holes in his canvas and allows some light to shine through. It's not sappy, there's no "happy ending." There is only the thought that while the world may be a dark place - one in which our humanity is often overshadowed by superficial divides like language, race, socio-economic class, national origin - human beings can offer one another hope. That the smallest human gesture, a touch, a kiss, a hug, a helping hand, a look of understanding, an act of kindness, can change our worlds. That treating one another with dignity can pull us from darkness.

I'm still not convinced that this was "THE" theme. Inarittu doesn't go out of his way to prove it. I suspect that different people will take different things away from this film. Perhaps I just didn't want to leave having my thoughts about the world reaffirmed over a bag of popcorn, but that was the way I saw it. The point is, I saw it, and so should you.