Movie Review: Babel

Babel is the movie I feel the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences selected as filler for this year’s nominations. Nominated for Best Picture, two women up for Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Original Score, and Original Screenplay give it seven nominations. Of those seven I can agree with perhaps one of them even having been considered.

I’m sure most people know the story about the Tower of Babel. How everyone spoke the same language and built a tower and pissed God off thinking they could do better without him. So he showed them by spreading them around and giving them all different languages. I knew Babel was going to have several languages in it. It wouldn’t make sense to give a film that name and have the whole thing in English. But that is the only similarity with the Biblical story.

Babel is similar to Syriana in that there are stories going on in different parts of the globe and does a better job connecting them. But that is as far as my compliments for the film go. The story taking place in Japan added nothing to the film and it wouldn’t have taken anything away to cut it completely. And while Rinko Kikuchi is one of the women up for Supporting Actress, there was absolutely no reason to make the character a deaf-mute -– other than to prolong the movie as it made her scenes take three times as long as they would have otherwise. The Japanese storyline could have been interesting in a stand-alone movie and giving some more details, but it had the smallest connection to the rest of the movie than the other two countries.

I felt the story taking place in the United States was the best of the three countries. Adriana Barraza was nominated for her role and she was really the only good thing about the movie. The audience can guess the two children belong to the Americans in Morocco before they spell it out, but the phone call shows Babel isn’t following any sort of linear timeline. I usually like movies that are disjointed, but there was absolutely no motivation for these stories to be told out of order.

The story in Morocco left me thinking three things. First, that trip must have been pretty expensive so I find it incredibly hard to believe none of the other tourists were doctors. Then I find it difficult to think they wouldn’t want to stay. If someone I was traveling with got shot while our bus was driving along, the last thing I would want to do is pile back on the bus and drive a few more ours. The last thing is the gun; who gives their child a fucking gun and then leaves them?

I left the film wondering what the point was. Is there anything I am supposed to walk away thinking about? Because the only think I am thinking is why the hell did it get seven Oscar nominations?