Babel - A Review
Aside from the allegory to the Biblical story of "The Tower of Babel", this movie was an amalgam of subjects and issues and a collage of human drama framed around confusion, lack of understanding, and lack of communication. True to the Biblical parable, the common theme that wove the 3 stories together is one of human despair and tragedy emanating from cultural bias, miscommunication, and misconstrued perceptions. Inarritu, the movie director, adopted the same style of cinematography, story telling, and underlying premise as in his previous movies, ‘Amores Perros’ and ‘21 Grams.’ This leads me to believe that ‘Babel’ is in fact, the 3rd installment of the trilogy.
It didn't seem like there was one actor you could label as principal in the movie. All of them were as important in the roles they respectively played. Moreover, I thought they all did an incredible job; although, in my opinion, Barraza (the Spanish nanny) was a tad better because of the way she handled the harrowing experience she was put thru and how she made every human emotion come out to life on the screen.
As a Moroccan, I didn't have a lot of objections to how they portrayed Morocco thru the movie. The village was chosen carefully and deliberately to accentuate the desolation and the poverty of a desert when compared to the desert of our cities and desolation of our cosmopolitan hearts. This is very much repeated with the artificial and plastic-like landscape of Tokyo and the dusty and windy village in Mexico. The Tazarine village is pretty much typical of many small villages in Morocco. They are dusty, infrastructure poor, but full of goodhearted, decent, and generous people.
I didn't object to the nakedness of the teenage Japanese girl, which I actually found to be more sad and heartrending than sexual. However, I thought the whole episode of voyeurism, masturbation, and incest was misguided and inappropriate. First, it sends an erroneous message to viewers who don’t know the people in that region of the world. Second, it has no place in the context of the movie theme or its direction.
There was however a scene at the end of the movie that depicts the real nature of the true Moroccan. It took place when Richard (Brad Pitt) handed some money to Anwar (Mohamed Akhzam - the guide) to thank him for standing by him and his wife and helping them thru their horrific ordeal. Anwar politely rejects the generous offer. The camera zooms in as his face fills the white screen. His facial expression conveys a sense of duty to lend a hand and an inappropriateness to take financial advantage of a dreadful incident. Regardless of what one might surmise from that particular scene, I thought it was one of redemption for anything I could have found objectionable with the movie.
3 out of 4 stars.
