The Bishop on Babel

Watching Babel, the Bishop sat expecting to overhear, from some perhaps less gifted member of the audience, a deep sigh—the sort of sigh that might be followed by, ‘You know, it really makes you think . . .’ It really made the Bishop think, too, your canonical commentator wondering if he could get some of his fifteen dollars back if he left halfway through.

Halfway through, with Babel, is about two days, but being overlong is the least of its portentous sins. The worst is earnestnest. Amongst the film’s Methuselan running time is not a single moment of humour—a sure sign of a burdened work—or at least no humour that has not been dipped in pathos and coated with a lesson in the woes that face our troubled world. Of course the world is troubled, and has been since long before the day director Alejandro González Iñárritu first picked up a camera, but that only leads us to the film’s next most egregious flaw: contrivance. The troubles, if we look, are there, they do not need to be manufactured. Babel, filmed in Morocco, Tokyo, and southwest North America, is more stage-managed than a Mexican wrestling match.

The Bishop will not bother to outline the plot; suffice it to say that Iñárritu and his partner in crime, writer Guillermo Arriaga, are in love with the idea of that there are all sorts of connections between people, and that one act leads to another, be it next door or on the other side of the world. This is no doubt true, but as an artistic theme about as startling or as worthy as noting that evil is bad or that some people have blonde hair; and as a cinematic trope, was well worn out in the pair’s other collaborations, the overrated Amores perros and the over-inflated 21 Grams.

With a name like Babel and two ardent symbolists at work, one would expect the film to have something to say about communication and the problems therewith. It does, but once again the revelations sit self-satisfied between the inane and the pat. Is it really such a surprise to learn that an Arabic-speaking Moroccan and an English-speaking American have trouble talking to each other? With so many languages at play, Babel offers subtitles; then, in its quest to impart Meaning, occasionally drops them, particularly at the end of scenes; all this as if to say, ‘What is being said here is obvious, it is in a language everyone can understand.’* This is exactly backwards. The artist’s job, at least in a work like this, is to challenge expectations, not fulfil them.

The acting is sufficient, though much less than Iñárritu no doubt thinks he has achieved. The characters are not. Two Moroccan children are brats of the first order. Early in the film they shoot at a bus, wounding a tourist. This is intended surely as a bit of reckless stupidity, but they are written with such rivalrous venon that it is hard to feel much about their subsequent fate. The Mexican nanny of two American children (Adriana Barraza), is expected to teach us about class distinctions, or at least the racism of the US Border Patrol. What comes across mostly is that she is rather dim. And Chieko, a deaf Japanese schoolgirl (almost realised by the watchable Rinko Kikuchi), is little more than an excuse for some of the most gratuitous nudity since Lady Godiva took up horse riding. Indeed, none of the characters are really characters at all, just bits of ‘serious acting’ demarcating, or decorating, this and that turn of the plot. They react to their environments, but their environments almost never react to them. If anything, the film may have chosen any one of these characters and, over a more modest length, told us of the distance between people. Instead it wants to be about the distance between worlds, and the result communicates about as well as an American tourist attempting to order a hamburger in a Paris café. Babble might be more like it.

The Bishop would like to make just one more pronouncement of his own, on Brad Pitt: who on earth is under the impression that this man can act? Some of our worst performances are wrought by those who merely mimic. Enduring Pitt time after time dole out his sole demonstrable emotion—petulance—one has the impression of an actor not yet even aping what his characters would do, but copying what another actor would do if he were pretending to do what his character would do.

*That, at least, is what the Bishop hopes; and not that the pair were simply substituting cheap mystery for illumination.