Babble On

Four down, one to go. This past Sunday, I went to see another one of this year's Oscar nominees for Best Picture, Babel. But while I loved Little Miss Sunshine, and generally liked The Departed and The Queen (and can understand why they're in contention), I did not care for this film. And Babel was the Golden Globe winner for Best Picture (Drama) to boot!

Babel is cast somewhat in the mold of last year's Best Picture winner, Crash. It doesn't feature as many characters or as many separate storylines, but the core principle is similar -- a number of short stories with only fleeting (if any) narrative connections, interspersed in a film under one thematic roof. But therein lies the major problem for me. The overall theme of Crash was right there, plain to see -- racism. I'm honestly not quite sure what the theme of Babel is supposed to be.

There are four stories in Babel: a married couple touring the Middle East, a pair of young brothers living in a Middle Eastern country, two children taken to Mexico on a day trip by their nanny, and a deaf Japanese teenager struggling with the death of her mother. Any topic you could conjecture as the theme to Babel seems to me to apply to only three of the stories, but not all four.

Is it a movie challenging the way Americans interact with the people of foreign countries? The story of the Japanese girl doesn't seem to fit that notion, because no one in her story ever interacts with anyone from another country.

Is it a story about parents and children not understanding one another? The story of the married couple doesn't fit that notion, as they are separated from their children for the entire movie.

Ultimately, you have to get to a topic as broad as "miscommunication" or "cultural differences" to find a theme that applies to all four stories. And I think at that point, the topic is too broad for this film to be making any particular statement about the theme.

Instead, it drifts lazily along at nearly two-and-a-half hours, often like four completely different short stories spliced together when someone mixed up a stack of film canisters. There are some powerful performances in the film, at least. The two women who received Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress are both compelling, and Brad Pitt is also commendable. But though the acting is good, and each one of the four stories taken on its own is well-told, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

I give the film a C+.