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I think the main problem with Babel is that we just don't care - at least I didn't. Iñárritu, who played the multi-layered storytelling game to near perfection in his debut feature Amores perros and pulled off a lesser yet more-than-competent follow-up in 21 Grams, seems to have run out of room for all his intertwining characterizations in Babel. Unfocused and unwieldy - and most importantly, uninteresting - Iñárritu's third film tries to tell the stories of ugly Americans and race relationships in a global community through the eyes of two farm boys in Morocco, a pair of rich American tourists who bring the world out for their cause célèbre, a Mexican-American nanny who drags her two blonde-haired, blue-eyed wards across the border for her son's wedding and a deaf young Japanese girl looking for love wherever she can find it.
The problem lies not in any of the acting (the performances of the cast are all stellar in their own way, although most do not get much of a chance to shine, and especially Cate Blanchett and Gael Garcia Bernal are totally wasted in such tiny hapless roles that never seem to go anywhere) but rather in the telling of the story. Much more accessible than his previous films - and mired in many ways to the same ground that the highly overrated Crash was heralded for - Babel, wasting away what made his previous films so frisky and dynamic, links its characters together in such ridiculous ham-handed (and somewhat racist) ways as to make one think "what the fuck!?" when handed to us on the screen. Often boring and even more often pretentious, though adequate in the most middle-of-the-road manner (again, the cast, when given the time, are superb and in many ways, save this film from itself), Babel is far from the causative, innovative, sooth-saying film it so desperately wants to be - and may very well think it is.
Of course my humble opinion is sure not to matter as Babel is sure to be a hit - in the same way Crash was - and sure to recieve several Oscar nods - in the same way Crash did - and sure to be overpraised for its naive social voice - in the same way Crash was. Babel ends up being - in the same way Crash was - an uneventful hand-wringing of pseudo-liberal guilt disguised as pseudo-arthouse cinema. Let us hope that Iñárritu doesn't get sucked into the vortex that is Hollywood and becomes the brave filmmaker once again that we all remember from his previous films. [11/16/06]
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