The Tower of Babel

Babel: Gonzalez Iñárritu, 2006

From January 5th

What a dissappointment. It’s a failure both in form and content. Desperate and well-known consequences of a cruel and harsh world, predictable devices and style without substance.

A film must be idiosyncratic, it must set up its own goals and follow them. Critics must acknowledge and recognize this if they wish to formulate an effective critique. This is my perspective when I say this film has failed. It undercuts its dramatic weight by making fickle decisions based on the assumption of its own greatness. In other words, the filmmaker felt his message was so very important that he never really addressed it, instead, he delivered a humanism that is melodramatic and stale. Stale. And incredibily pretentious.

What is meant by “Babel”? In the Biblical story, humans were brought down by their arrogance, not by merciless chance and aleatory suffering. Humanity suffered the wrath of God as a consequence of its own decisions. But this film does not address the human capacity for moral choice, rather, it resorts to victimization and simplification. All of the protagonists are likeable people who make mistakes in a moment of weakness or innocence, but they are really good people at heart. At most the film celebrates the ideas that bad things happen to good people and that we are all interconnected. Its strategy is to show this on the most universal scale it can find, by literally linking the world through a plethora of coincidences in its characters. It is a statement that is so thoroughly shallow that the film ends up becoming very distant and even rather absurd, like an elaborate quid pro quo.

In contrast, in Amores Perros, Iñárritu’s first film, the characters were truly three-dimensional. They were flawed characters capable of good and evil, and they lived in a mixture of free-will and chance. They had to live with both and their connections did not seem so arbirtrary and didactic.

Babel is a film that attempts to address the nature of our age. It tries to position itself at the juncture of current events, being shot on three continents and four countries, in their original languages, with both famous and non professional actors, etc. It wants to be the globalization film, one that captures the human emotion and drama at the heart of the global paradox. But ironically such lofty goal gives way to precisely the kind of gratutious melodrama that is empty of real social analysis. It fails under the weight of its own sense of self-importance, and despite its documentary-style aesthetic its effect is actually similar to that of a Hollywood blockbuster–rather than entertaining with action without substance, it entertains with empty emotions and the excitement of exotic cultures it never really understood.

The film is ultimately counter-productive to its moral ambitions, not only because it misses the point entirely, but also because it takes up so much media space and attention that could actually be used by more meaningful and coherent work about the changing nature of our world society.