Babel

Babel

2006

Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu

Starring: Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt, Adriana Barraza, Rinko Kikuchi

My husband rarely watches my 1001 Movies flicks with me.  He’s not a movie buff the way I am, and I would never want to force him to watch, say, an intense Swedish film – like Bergman – unless, for some reason, he really wanted to.  Which normally, he doesn’t.  But he wound up watching Babel with me, almost on accident, in that he was playing a video game in the same room and wound up getting pulled into the film, watching the last hour with the video game on pause.  Do not let this be a comment on Babel amazing quality, however, as when it was over, we turned to look at one another and vocalized our almost identical reactions. 

“That could have been so much better.”

Waving the ride of the concept of telling multiple interconnected stories, Babel’s interconnected stories are in Morocco, California and Mexico, and Tokyo.  An American couple (Blanchett and Pitt) are vacationing in Morocco when the wife is accidentally shot on their tour bus.  The shooter is a young Moroccan boy out tending goats with his older brother; the two were simply monkeying around with the new rifle their father bought for killing jackals.  While the young boys panic and try to hide what they did, the husband of the stricken wife desperately searches for medical attention in the remote farmland of a country whose language and custom he does not know.  Meanwhile, back in California, the children of the American couple are taken to Mexico by their live-in nanny Amelia (Barraza) because her son is getting married and she can find no one to look after them.  While things are fine initially, problems eventually arise.  And finally, in Japan, a teenage deaf-mute Chieko (Kikuchi) is frustrated enough at the world for not understanding her condition; her distant father and dead mother don’t make things any easier.  Chieko starts acting out in possibly dangerous ways as we begin to understand just how angry and hurt she really is.

The reason I said above that this could have been so much better is because the central themes of Babel are good ones, solid ones, even necessary ones.  The very idea that we live in an age of international connectivity is one that is vital to moving forward, and yet this remains an idea that many people, cultures, and countries eschew.  The issues Babel raises around this theme, that of language barriers and lack of communication, are equally profound.  We are all connected to one another, and we must embrace this as the world becomes smaller and smaller, but we have a great deal of barriers in our way that prevent us from truly embracing the similarities we all have.  This idea is important.  Babel deals with important and significant cultural debates. 

It just doesn’t delve into these questions nearly as well as it thinks it does.

Three of the four central tales in Babel are all clearly linked to one another.  The American woman is shot by kids in Morocco while the woman’s own children attend their nanny’s son’s wedding in Mexico back home.  Yes, three stories, all with a very clear thread of connectivity.  Then there’s the Tokyo story.  Yes, there is a link between Chieko’s tale and what’s happening with the other characters, but it’s flimsy at best and feels like a big stretch, as if the writers came up with this great Tokyo plotline but had to find a way to shoehorn it in to the other threads.  Right away, this takes away from Babel’s strength as a film, as there seems to be an oddball tale awkwardly fitted in between the other, related plotlines.  Which is really a shame, because for my money, the Tokyo plotline was easily the most interesting part of the film.  Granted, the type of story and characters in this chapter make me predisposed to liking it more – few, introspective characters, internal turmoil, drama and angst, as opposed to the distinct action/adventure/thriller aspect of the other three tales – but even my husband admitted to finding the Tokyo story (a phrase I cannot type without thinking Ozu) the most compelling, and he’s definitely an action/adventure/thrilling kind of guy.  Honestly, I wish it had been its own film; Kikuchi’s Chieko is devastatingly honest and a frightening pillar of uncontrolled strength and emotion.  When she is not commanding the screen, the film lags, as if Babel itself wishes it could have spent more time with Chieko.

Although for my money, Kikuchi is the best of the bunch, the performances in Babel are all stellar and were probably the biggest strength of the film.  Naturally, Cate Blanchett is amazing, but that’s rather a given.  It’s easy to understand why Adriana Bazzara earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, but it’s Brad Pitt and the nonprofessional Moroccan actors who really manage to buoy the entire film.  Pitt is an actor easy to underestimate; his non-stop tabloid presence and impossible good looks can work against him.  But here, he is very good, very strong as a man who finds himself entirely out of his league and facing a life and death situation.  Right alongside him, the actors portraying the Moroccan family torn asunder by a rifle do a tremendous job.  The two young boys underplay most of their scenes, a fact that works best with child actors, and the Moroccan father believably carries the role of emotional heavy in what is a gut-wrenching tale.  Innaritu must be commended for coaxing such strong performances from every single member of such a varied cast.

*********************************SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING************************************

But ultimately, I have a bit of a problem with the overall message of the film, and this is why I say it could have been such a better movie.  When considering the ending of all four stories, I have to ponder what exactly Innaritu managed to say.  Think: the Moroccan family is completely torn apart, facing jail and possibly the death of one of its own.  Their lives will never be the same again.  The Mexican maid is ungraciously deported, forced to leave behind her entire life and not allowed even a suitcase of her belongings.  Chieko’s emotional future is anything but certain as she pushed herself to dangerous places.  Three of the four stories have distinctly downer endings.

But what happens to the white people?  Oh, no worries, everyone survives and gets back home in one piece.  Really, is that the message we’re going with?  Everyone’s interconnected in this world of ours, and bad stuff happens all over the place, but if you’re American, everything will be fine?  Is this some sort of subtle commentary on white privilege by Innaritu?  Although you may disagree with me on this one, I don’t think it is.  Rather, I feel like the writers felt the need to have one story end happily and they picked the white Americans one.  I really wish they hadn’t.  It would have felt so much stronger to have one of the stories involving a different culture, a different set of people, end well and to have something sad happen to the Americans.  But no, Babel is fundamentally an American film, marketed and shown to American audiences, and we can’t have our American audiences having their delicate sensibilities upset.  So we’ll force all the tragedy onto the people of color and ensure that our own get through unscathed.  This wrapping up of the plotlines undercuts the international message of the film, and thus much of the power of Babel.  Again, this could have been better.

Edit to add: After a bit of time away from this, perhaps the above is the point? Perhaps Innaritu is actually brilliantly calling out white privilege by having that plot line be the only one that has anywhere near a happy resolution. Actually, I don’t believe that is the case, I don’t feel this movie is quite that… clever, but I admit it’s a possibility.

***************************************DONE WITH THAT THEN*******************************

Babel smacks too much of a film specifically designed to make you feel like crap.  The stories continually scream at you to “BE SAD!!”  And if that isn’t enough, all the ancillary filmmaking techniques, such as score and cinematography, belabor the point, yelling at you to “BE SADDER!!!!!!!!”  While a perfectly acceptable film in that there isn’t anything too egregiously wrong with it, I was left a touch underwhelmed.  This is disappointing, as the issues Babel raises are interesting ones.  Again, I reiterate that the biggest message I got from it was wishing that Chieko’s plotline had been developed into a standalone film, as I would rather have watched that.

Arbitrary Rating: 7/10.

The Host (Gwoemul)

The Host (Gwoemul)

2006

Director: Bong Joon-hu

Starring: Song Kang-ho, Go Ah-sung, Byeon Hee-bong

I am continually wary of modern horror films, because modern horror films delight in showing ridiculous amounts of gore.  You know; torture porn.  And this is not for me.  Logically, I know they are not all that way, but I’m not always logical, so I tend to steer clear as much as possible from these films.  But 1001 Movies can be a great motivator, so I finally said “okay” to The Host, a modern Korean monster horror picture.  That’s also a comedy.  And a political satire.  Amongst other things.  And I quickly realized that The Host is nothing like many other modern horror films.  

The story opens with what can only be described as a psychotic American military doctor ordering his Korean assistant to pour hundreds of bottles of formaldehyde down the drain to eventually empty into the Han River.  Naturally, six years later, a horrifying mutant monster emerges (keeping my mouth shut about the chemical reactivity and mutagenic capacity of methanaldehyde here), but not before we are introduced to Gang-du (Song), a slacker of a grownup who can barely keep his eyes open while manning his father’s (Byeon) tiny convenience store.  When the monster cuts a wide swath of destruction, Gang-du tries to fight it off, but instead manages to lose his only daughter, Hyun-seo (Go), to the monster in the process.  Initially thinking her dead, Gang-du, his father, and his brother and sister later believe that Hyun-seo is still alive in the sewers, which prompts them to come together to fight off the monster and the military, who fervently believe Gang-du has been infected with a virus. 

There are several facets to The Host that make it palatable to me, someone who actively tries to avoid this sort of monster horror film.  The first one, and one that goes quite a long way, is the broad streak of black comedy painted up and down and sideways throughout The Host.  I laughed, and actually laughed out loud in the room by myself, several times.  The yellow-clad government agent who makes his entrance by falling down, the fact that the stupidly brave American is one of the first to try to attack the monster (of course!), the unexpected dropping of key objects at certain points, and probably my favorite funny moment, when Hyun-seo’s family believes she’s dead.  Right there, that should not be funny.  A young child is believed dead by her relatives?  Not funny.  But watch the four actors wail ridiculously and flop around on the ground to such utter excess, I laughed out loud, and more than once.  The Host is not comedy first, it definitely primarily identifies as monster horror first and foremost, but it keeps a tone of never being entirely serious that goes a long way to help me keep it down.

This made me laugh.  A lot.

While the comedy helps me make it through the film, what I respect most about The Host is how it plays with preconceived film notions.  First of all, in a monster horror film, one does not have the monster attack in the first ten minutes.  No, the first ten minutes are for establishing “back story.”  “Eff that,” The Host says, “You’re going to have not just a monster attack, but an extended and pretty significant monster attack really early on, and you’ll like it.”  What’s more, this attack takes place in the middle of the afternoon on a beautiful sunlit day.  This is so counterintuitive when it comes to any kind of horror film, let alone monster horror, that it can’t help but be refreshing.  What’s more, The Host really plays fully and freely with the concept of “movie death.”  We have been trained to anticipate certain filmic cues as “that character just died,” when, in fact, we have no actual confirmation of that.  The Host exploits this idea, convincing the audience on more than one occasion that it just killed off a character, only to reveal, twenty minutes later, that nope, you just made the wrong assumption.  The effect this causes is two-fold; one, it keeps you, the viewer, on your toes and much more actively engaged in the film when you realize that “normal movie rules” no longer apply, and two, when a character actually dies, it’s much more poignant.  As a monster horror film, you expect character deaths, accept them as a matter of course.  But by bending the rules, The Host manages to make those deaths much more meaningful.

  

The Host also has a very clear anti-government message in it.  The government’s handling of the monster attack is nothing short of disastrous, with mixed messages and inadequate workers.  Nothing from government officials actually helps our band of heroes at all, and instead, very quickly, the government becomes antagonistic.  What’s worse, rather than simply trying to get in our heroes’ way, the government starts talking about “the virus.”  Everyone must be contained because of “the virus,” never mind the fact that no one has any symptoms.  There’s nothing like the mass marketing of paranoia and fear to help out martial law.  What’s more, the government fights the monster by unleashing “Agent Orange,” biological warfare that winds up being ineffective.  As to which governments The Host is unimpressed with, it is both its own (South Korea), but also the US.  Seen as both the perpetrator of the original problem and also a major player in the mishandling of public information, the US hardly gets a glowing recommendation in The Host.  As for myself, I saw in The Host not a small amount of allegory to the US invasion of Iraq in 2002 and the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.  Again, not what I expected from a Korean monster horror flick.

  

And that’s really my biggest takeaway from The Host.  It was not at all what I expected, and it itself actively fights against your expectations as the story develops.  With a focus far more on people than the mutant monster, there is a lot going on here besides a simple horror story.  I can’t say that I would ever want to watch The Host again, because this is not my type of film, but I’m glad I saw it, and I have a great deal of respect for it.

Arbitrary Rating: 8/10

Borat

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
2006
Director: Larry Charles
Starring: Sacha Baron Cohen, Ken Davitian

Borat (Cohen) is a television personality for Kazahstan national television. In order to, well, make benefit glorious nation of Kazahstan, he and his producer Azamat (Davitian) set off for America. Once there, Borat becomes infatuated with Pamela Anderson from watching old Baywatch reruns, and becomes insistent on traveling across America to California in order to meet her. Along the way, he interacts with several unwitting Americans, exposing uncomfortable cultural truths about our country.

In order for me to write about Borat, I have to explain something about myself. I’m kinda snooty. And I’m okay with that. After all, a little pretension never hurt anybody. I’ve always liked things that are kinda snooty. I love intense film dramas, classic literature, classical music, and bel canto opera. I do not listen to pop music, I think it’s a waste of time, and I realized that when I was in sixth grade. You give me a choice of anything in the world to listen to, and I’ll probably pick Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore or Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia. See, I’m such a snob, I call the operas by their Italian names.

Common or lowbrow humor usually does phenomenally little for me. Superbad was gawdawful. I had to physically leave the room about thirty minutes into The Hangover, I was enjoying myself that little. Real Housewives, Kim Kardashian, Jersey Shore - I weep for the future because of the success of such things.

Once

Once
2006
Director: John Carney
Starring: Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova

A Guy (Hansard) and a Girl (Irglova) meet in Dublin. Both are musicians without an outlet, both are working menial jobs to barely make enough money to get by, and both have recently been dealt losses in their love lives. Drawn together by music, they rehearse and record an album of the guy’s original songs, all while a strong romantic attraction between them looms in the background.

This is an incredibly sweet film. “Sweet” can be such a terrible word, but I mean it un-ironically here. The growing affection between the guy and girl feels natural and unforced but still manages to make me feel all warm and glowing on the inside; even better, it has realistic missteps. Early on in the film, the guy invites the girl back to his bedroom and asks her to spend the night, to which she replies, “Fuck this,” and leaves. He feels stupid, and must make amends later. Little glitches like this in their relationship make it feel far more relatable. As Shakespeare said, “The course of true love never did run smooth.” I really appreciate that about the film; it manages to set the romance apart from the thousands of other stereotypical film romances.