Since I got a head start on Babel (see my last post), I was able to finish it up last night. The film overwhelmed me with its attention to simple cultural artifact and its bursting grandiose vision of what film can do.
The cultural and geographic displacement of the characters, and more importantly, the American audience is a work of art: the exuberant celebration of Mexican marriage, the throbbing American dance tunes in a Japanese club seen through the eyes of a deaf-mute girl, the Moroccan family fingering their food from the same bowl. As the images of culturally situated joy dispense, the raw human emotion comes on full force: the mighty Brad Pitt, blood drenched, helping the urine soaked Kate Blanchett onto a make-shift bed pan, the Mexican caretaker with torn festive dress and mascara blurred eyes tromping through the desert in high heels, the Moroccan herdsboy bravely proclaiming before armed men his guilt in a plea for his brother's life.
Displaced from cultural and emotional bearing, Babel is beautiful in its attempt at grandeur, making, as Slate critique Dana Stevens concludes, the award winning "Crash, another recent film with converging stories and a multicultural cast, look like an undergraduate term paper on race relations."
4 comments:
I, too, thought Babel was quite wonderful. I loved its structure and its argument. There were parts that really, really got me--the Moroccan kids and their father, especially, as well as the Japanese girl. I thought Brad Pitt was tremendous, and I don't always think so. The Mexican wedding scenes were also fantastic--kinetic, vibrant, dangerous. Gael Garcia Bernal was amazing, too. The film as a whole, however, had a cool effect--it was intellectual rather than emotional, overall. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. I thought its gesture was analytic, with emotional overtones, rather than the reverse. For me, the moments that connected emotionally were all actor's moments. That's okay, I think--the actors created great, immediate performances.
Yes, I would generally agree--intellectual first but would say the emotional comes later, building from the whole. Part of this, I think, is related to the vast and disparate plots and characters. We just don't spend enough time with any one of them to be caught up completely with them emotionally. And, it seems, some of this disconnectedness and displacement is intentional, is part of what makes the whole of the movie successful.
Admittedly the emotional experience may be a bit hampered by some self-conscious film making: Mexican setting events are seen first but we find out happen last, in and out noise at the discoteca, and too perfect transitions between settings.
But this discussion reminds me that intellectual and emotional categories are often seen as more discrete and antithetical than they really are. I'm concerned that sometimes a film or book might be panned because it was "merely" intellectual without real emotion. Some of my most poignant experiences with film and literature are "intellctually emotional" or, maybe, "emotionally intellectual." I want to resist the untwining of these two categories.
I think what I'm saying is that, for me, there are other films that more successfully enact the inseparability of emotion and analysis. I think Babel is a wonderful film, but it didn't do it for me the way, say, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind did, or even Children of Men this year. Or, even, The Departed. Babel may have a more serious subject matter, but The Departed moved me more, stayed with me longer.
What I really liked about Babel was how vastly remote each character's world view was presented--so much so that they seemed, ultimately, inaccessible to outsiders. Still, I don't think Babel was nearly as good as Amorres Perros, the director's first feature.
My critique, though, is the exact opposite of Lisa's.
In general, I can't stand emotional manipulation in films; I prefer to maintain a critical distance. And part of what I didn't like about Babel was it's emotional gimmickry--trying to pull at my heartstrings instead of making me think--think and experience, that is.
I'm not saying I dislike being emotionally engaged--but I think you can do that without manipulation. For example, I just saw Marsela by Lars Von Trier, and I had to pause three or four times because I was so emotionally twisted by what was happening. Trier's style is so cold and self-consciously fake that you can't escape his message. You can't lose yourself in the cinematic moment the way you can with most American films. In Babel, the emotions seemed to serve as an outlet from taking the film's message seriously--a means of feeling like we've accomplished something by just sitting on our asses and watching Brad Pitt show his vulnerable side. It provided a catharsis--a sense of conclusion, whereas Trier's films (and Amorres Perros) make me more aware of life's complexities and troublesome truths. Put another way, I thought Babel tried way to hard to find a happy Hollywood message, when the real world doesn't really offer one.
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