"Babel"-- Murphy's Law Hits Overdrive

Drama
Rating: R

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (dir.)
Brad Pitt
Cate Blanchett
Gael Garcia Bernal
Koji Yakusho

"Babel" is a movie in the tradition of recent "mosaic" films like Stephen Soderberg's Traffic (2000) and the Best Picture Oscar winner, "Crash". The ingredients are a mixed group of people of different cultures, economic levels, professions and attitudes who somehow have an effect on one another. There may be stars in the films, but they share screen time with many other thespians. The directors and writers usually are trying to point out that we live in a much smaller world than we imagine and what happens on one side of a city (or the globe) can have profound effects on the lives of others.

In a way these films are the aesthetically upscale version of the 1970's disaster films such as "Earthquake" and "The Poseidon Adventure". The difference is that the cast is not trapped together in a plane liable to crash or in the hull of a submerged ocean liner, but spread out and often well apart geographically from one another. In both cases, though, we get to see how people react when their world of privilege or poverty is intruded upon by the actions of those they don't know. In a disaster film, it is fate or chance or God or slipshod architecture that is testing our protagonists and to see who can shine and survive under duress and who crumbles like a four dollar lawn chair.

In these newer movies, it is our blindness to the lives of others that is intruded upon. In Babel, the disaster is fomented by Murphy's Law: if something can go wrong, it will.

Some have pointed out that Murphy may have been optimistic by nature.

Three of the stories here work well together: (1) Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett play a American couple traveling in Morocco. They are not having a good time together and things get worse when she gets shot while minding her own business on a tour bus. This kind of thing could happen in Antioch, California or Lubbock ,Texas, of course, but its Morocco and the shooting brings us to the next story (2) about two Moroccan kids who are given a newly-purchased rifle by their father to shoot jackals with to keep their livestock safe. The father seems like an intelligent man--until he gives the boys the rifle and then leaves them unsupervised with a deadly weapon neither kid has any experience in using.

Then it is clear the shepherd is an idiot.

If I were a Moroccan shepherd I'd feel insulted by this, but because I'm not I'll chock it up to dramatic license: the plot requires anything bad that COULD happen has to happen to somebody so its a hunting and a shooting the kids must go.

Story (3) concerns a nice middle-aged Mexican lady who is the maid or nanny of the American couple in Morocco. This is where Murphy's Law is in full force. The lady tries to do a good deed for her employers, and also attend a wedding south of San Diego in Baja. What happens to her and the children in her charge is very dire. It's a good illustration of some of the problems of modern immigration: people who are good enough to look after the lawns, kitchens and children of well-off American citizens must live like lepers to stay at their posts. I'm not advocating total amnesty, but there has to be a better way than the present paradoxical system Washington politics currently dictates.

The fourth story is where the woven threads of the film break down. This concerns a unstable upper-class Japanese teen (Koji Yakusho) who is having a nervous breakdown following the death of one of her parents. That she is a deaf-mute is not helping her self-esteem, either. One can see why this performance garnered an Oscar nomination for Ms. Yakusho. The story is compelling to a point, however, it seems to better belong in another movie : the connection to the other three stories is tangential at best and, therefore, there's little dramatic blowback from the other stories.

Both "Traffic" and Crash (2005) did a better job integrating everything (and every main character) at the end. Here that attempt seems a bit slapdash, thanks in part to the Japanese story and also the way the stories are edited in a way that cheats a "real time" format that would have brought the threads together instead of having the audience guess what is going on when.

This is 3/4 of a good film, nonetheless. The concept of "Babel"(i.e., the confusion by God of human language as told in the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11) seems apt for the stories. There are also points where characters are allowed to break through the language/culture divide, as when an older woman helps the injured American lady with some homemade painkillers, or when another character refuses to accept money for an altruistic act, that points to glimmers of hope for a humankind destined to deal with tragedy whenever Murphy's Law strikes in ways orderly and disperate.