Babel
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.