Overall Rating
  Awesome: 16.52%
Worth A Look: 13.91%
Just Average: 24.35%
Pretty Crappy: 24.35%
Sucks: 20.87%
9 reviews, 61 user ratings
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| Babel |
by Dawn Taylor
"Artificially manufactured angst about people who are complete dumbasses."
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With an excellent cast, great pre-release buzz and a blatant play for the same hearts and minds that voted for 'Crash' as Best Picture, you can be sure that 'Babel' will get a lot of attention. The question, then, is how many of the people who see this film will be dazzled by its self-conscious, self-serving claptrap and overlook the fact that it's really not about anything except the trouble people get into when they act like dumbasses.And there are dumbasses aplenty on display in Babel, believe me. First, there's the pair of young Moroccan morons who get the ball rolling by using the rifle their father has given them to shoot the jackals that attack their sheep, and instead use it to wing off a few shots at a passing tour bus. Their father's no rocket scientist, either, handing them a powerful hunting rifle without any instructions (like maybe, "Don't shoot at passing vehicles"), and he gets even stupider toward the end of the film.
Did I mention that one of the boys likes to peek at his sister while she changes her clothes and then run behind a rock to masturbate? Yeah, he does. And no, it doesn't have anything to do with the plot, which makes it even creepier.
So one of the kids actually hits the bus, accidentally shooting an American tourist (Cate Blanchett) who's traveling through Morocco with her husband (Brad Pitt). Apparently they had a baby who died and they're pissed off at each other about it. No, this doesn't have anything to do with the plot, either.
Back in the U.S., the couple's dumbass housekeeper (Adriana Barraza) needs to go to her son's wedding, despite her employers still being in Morocco. So she decides that it's a good idea to take the couple's two small children with her across the border into Mexico, driven by her skeezy nephew (Gael García Bernal). This, unsurprisingly, goes badly when they try to come back home.
Elsewhere in the world, a deaf-mute Japanese teenager (Rinko Kikushi) works out her issues regarding her mother's suicide by taking off her panties and flashing a boy in a restaurant and then hitting on her dentist. Thankfully, the dentist doesn't take her up on the offer and sends her away, making him one of perhaps three characters in the film who doesn't choose the absolute stupidest course of action when faced with a decision.
By the time director Alejandro González Iñárritu -- director of the overpraised Amores Perros and the gawdawful 21 Grams -- lets you in on the whisper-thin thread that connects the Japanese girl's story to the other two, the film's already gone on for about 40 minutes more than it should have so it's hard to care. Meanwhile, the Mexican housekeeper and the Moroccan kids' dad make survival choices so incredibly, jaw-droppingly stupid that it starts to feel like they deserve every bad thing that Iñárritu throws at them.
Which is the basic problem with the movie -- everything that happens in the film happens because the characters make idiotic choices. And they make those idiotic choices not because they're stupid, but because Iñárritu's script dictates that they do stupid things. The entire film is a huge, artificially manufactured farce of anguish that relies on dumbasses doing dumbass things. So who the hell cares what happens to them?
On top of everything else, the movie also drags horribly, with scenes about nothing in particular (cars driving down the road, drunk Japenese kids cavorting on a playground, people partying at the wedding) going on and on and on without adding anything significant to the story. While this should be a relief from the almost non-stop dumbassery of the rest of the film, it just makes the whole parade of idiocy last longer.
There will be critics who praise this film to the high heavens for its "humanity" and it's "gritty realism." There's also Oscar talk about Pitt's performance -- which is serviceable, but really just consists of his getting angry a lot and insisting that he needs to save his wife. Pitt's a fine actor, but he's done considerably better work than what's on display here. Frankly, no one in this film, besides the nutty pantsless Japanese girl, offers anything of any depth.'Babel' wants to be 'Crash' or 'Syriana' so badly, you can almost see the ghost images of those two films burned into the celluloid. What sets 'Babel' apart from those movies is sheer substance. At the end of the day, 'Babel' isn't actually about anything. It's just 140 minutes of self-conscious, cinematic masturbation that's dressed up in Oscar-bait clothing.
link directly to this review at https://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=15013&reviewer=413
originally posted: 11/08/06 02:20:09
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2006 Toronto Film Festival For more in the 2006 Toronto Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2006 Chicago Film Festival For more in the 2006 Chicago Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
27-Oct-2006 (R)
DVD: 20-Feb-2007
UK
N/A
Australia
26-Dec-2006
![[trailer]](/images/icon/trailericon.gif) Trailer
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