According to Colwell

Babel is a skillfully acted and produced movie that fails because the tragic circumstances in two of the three stories are brought about not by necessity but by the unbelievably bad decisions of the characters. And I do mean “unbelievably”, as in “no one would do those things”. The three stories are linked together, but the links are totally inconsequential to the events in each story. Nothing would be different about the stories or their impact if they were simply presented as independent stories. Nothing in the stories hinges upon people not being able to communicate with each other, counter to the implication of the title and the preview.

The preview shows us that Cate Blanchett’s character is shot while vacationing in Morocco. That is the critical event in that storyline, but it all comes about because a goatherder’s son decides to shoot at a bus. He does this knowing that he very well might hit it. The kid is not evil, does not hate Americans or foreigners, and is only doing it for target practice. I didn’t buy it. In another story, the live-in nanny for two young American kids takes them across the border to Mexico for her son’s wedding after being unable to find anyone to care for them for the day. Anyone who is wealthy enough to have a live-in nanny is going to have friends who can take care of those kids in an emergency, especially when they know from CNN that their parents are stuck in Morocco because one of them has been shot! And the nanny turns out to be an illegal immigrant! How did she think she was going to get across the border not once but twice with kids who are not her own? I could not get emotionally involved in the consequences of these messes because I didn’t believe anyone would ever make those decisions.

The world is full of tragic circumstances, so it is puzzling to me that this movie had such contrived and implausible circumstances on which to built its stories. I liked the acting in all three stories, and I found the third story about a deaf Japanese high school girl desperate for affection to work well on its own terms.

Christopher Guest’s latest keeps the same cast of self-important characters as his recent mockumentaries A Mighty Wind and Best in Show, but in For Your Consideration he presents them in a traditional fictional narrative rather than in documentary style. Guest plays the director of what is clearly a terrible movie, “Home for Purim”, about a southern American Jewish family in World War II dealing with a dying mother (played by Catherine O’Hara) and a lesbian daughter (played by Parker Posey). Bob Balaban and Michael McKean play the screenwriters. The premise of the movie is that an internet rumor gets started hinting that O’Hara’s character, Marilyn Hack (get it?), might get an Oscar nomination for her performance in “Home for Purim”. This rumor starts before the movie has finished filming and therefore before anyone with any sense has seen it. The rumor mill picks up a life of its own as the male lead, Victor Allan Miller (Harry Shearer), also starts to get Oscar buzz and the two make the rounds of the L.A. morning shows and Hollywood gossip shows.

Consideration generates some laughs from the preposterous behavior of its characters and from the absurdity of the movie they are making. “Home for Purim” features deep South accents mixed with bad acting and reading from the book of Esther along with heavy use of the Purim “gragger” or noisemaker as part of the tradition of this holiday. The movie’s publicist has only barely heard of the “World Wide Interweb”, Victor Allan Miller is auditioning for radio commercials in Oregon while filming “Purim”, and Marilyn Hack is best known for her portrayal of a cross-eyed blind prostitute twenty years ago. It is so far beyond credible that “Purim” would ever get made, let alone generate Oscar buzz, that it keeps Consideration from rising above the level of a simple exercise in mockery. In Guest’s Waiting for Guffman it was much easier to accept characters in a quiet midwestern town dreaming of fifteen minutes of fame than it is to imagine in Consideration that the entire Hollywood movie culture has simultaneously lost its collective mind. It would have been both funnier and more engaging to have this be about actors with at least some talent and a movie that is not laughably bad. The clips we see from the other Oscar-worthy movies in the world of Consideration are also atrocious. Perhaps Guest is trying to send-up all self-important actors and filmmakers. If so, it would have been more effective to have his actors be a bit less ridiculous.

Harold Crick, single, lonely IRS agent, hears the voice of author Karen Eiffel narrating his life as it happens to him. If he screams at the sky for the voice to stop, he simply hears the implacable voice of Emma Thompson describing her character screaming at the sky in frustration. The cinematic device of having a character hear his life narrated in the third person omniscient allows Crick to examine his own life as another person might see it. This casts a harsh light on his existence that acts as a catalyst for Crick to reinvent himself. Just as novels follow the arc of a character, by seeing his own existence in literary terms, Crick is forced put his life on a new trajectory. The critical question, he discovers with the help of a literary professor (played by Dustin Hoffman), is whether his life is going to be a comedy or a tragedy.

When he meets Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a cute and rebellious baker (whom he’s auditing), he’s instantly smitten and she is naturally antagonistic toward him because of his professional duty to check her taxes. This smacks of comedy, but when he flubs his chances to court her, things seem to trend dangerously toward tragedy. The movie has a deft and understated tone even as it builds towards questions of life and death. Director Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Monster’s Ball) allows his actors to shine without interference from gimmickry in a movie that is built on a gimmick. The screenplay is by Zach Helm in his first cinematic production, and he too keeps the movie about the characters and not the gimmick. How Crick is hearing his life narrated by Eiffel is immaterial, and the movie wisely doesn’t concern itself with that. The essence of the story is in the characters of Crick and Eiffel and how they get to know themselves in a way they never could before.

Borat can’t make up its mind what kind of movie it wants to be. As a result, it is an amalgam of three different movie ideas, each executed with mixed results. Movie 1 is a farce about a ridiculous foreigner, Borat, working his way across America so that he can marry Pamela Anderson. Movie 2 is in the style of “Candid Camera” or “Punk’d”, where Borat is a rude buffoon to elicit funny responses from passersby. Movie 3 is in the style of the correspondents’ reports on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”, where Borat interviews Americans and either provokes them (telling a group of feminists that women have tiny brains) or plays up their own prejudices to expose them. While each movie idea has the potential to be funny, the inconsistent nature of the movie diminishes the individual elements.

The movie pretends to be the documentary footage of a backwards foreigner learning about American culture for the betterment of his own country (nominally Kazakhstan, though of course it bears no resemblance to any real country). We are introduced to a producer, and though we never see the cameraman, Borat addresses the camera directly. When he is in principle alone and abandoned, we still see professional camera shots of his vehicle driving down the highway. Who took those shots, in the premise of the movie? Many of the people he encounters have been fooled into thinking that he really is from Kazakhstan and really is traveling across the country to learn about American culture. That is, they are not actors and are not reading from a script, and we, watching the movie, know this. For example, Borat befriends a prostitute in the mode of Movie 3, but later he has her pretending to be his wife not for the sake of other people in the movie, but for the camera and the sake of the fake documentary. She switches, in other words, from being one of the people being fooled by actor Sascha Baron Cohen into an actor herself in Cohen’s movie.

There are several scenes where Cohen behaves outrageously, but the response he gets is just what anyone would do when confronted with such behavior. Affecting gangsta rap behavior, he pulls his waistband below his ass, exposing ridiculous underwear, and goes into the lobby of a posh hotel spouting mildly obscene street slang. So the hotel staff ask him, and then force him, to leave. This is Cohen interacting with people in the mode of Movie 3, but the staff response is entirely appropriate and therefore not funny. If this were part of an attempt to tell a story (Movie 1), and the hotel staff were actors helping tell the story, then it could have been funny because we would be emotionally involved in the character of Borat. But we are constantly reminded that in fact we are seeing something more like Candid Camera, so we don’t care about Borat as a character at all: he is just acting that way to provoke people. Occasionally it is funny, but more often it is merely someone going around being obnoxious.

The Queen portrays the reactions of Queen Elizabeth II and newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair to the death of Princess Diana in 1997 and the change that it brought to the relationship between the people of England and the royal family. Or perhaps the change was just in the queen’s understanding of her relationship to the people. Helen Mirren portrays the monarch, with James Cromwell as her grumpy husband, Prince Philip, who is even less willing to recognize and deal with the public outpouring of grief than the queen is. Secluded at their enormous Scottish estate of Balmoral, Philip’s plan for helping Diana’s sons (virtually invisible in the movie) is to take them deer hunting. Prince Charles, meanwhile, is equally broken up over the loss of the boys’ mother (whom, he pointedly tells his mother, was never afraid to show affection to her sons) and fear of the public reaction to his part in driving Diana out of the royal family.

PM Blair, meanwhile, has to balance the etiquette of dealing with the queen with the need to, as he puts it, “save these people from themselves”. But Elizabeth is a sympathetic character in this movie. Inheriting the role of monarch at the age of 25, her role transformed without her even realizing it. At least that is the out that the movie provides to explain her public bungling of the aftermath of Diana’s death. Stuck in an age where the monarch is apart and above her subjects, she failed to recognized that she now lives in a world full of royalty, namely celebrities. And the rules for celebrity behavior are decidedly different than the rules the queen had learned. Diana understood celebrity, and her death taught her family something about it.