According to Colwell

This powerful movie puts the brutality and chaos of civil war in Africa in the viewer’s face in an uncompromising and unrelenting way. Leonardo DiCaprio gives an excellent performance as a Danny Archer, a diamond smuggler working the diamond black market from war-torn Sierra Leone where rebels run slave diamond mines to finance their war against the government. Djimon Hounsou also delivers a moving performance as Solomon Vandy, a fisherman whose family is torn apart by the marauding rebel gangs. He finds a large diamond in the mine and hides it before ending up in prison with Archer who immediately sees in Vandy a ticket out of Africa.

Vandy’s sole concern is to find his family, a wife and two young daughters who are refugees, and his son who is abducted and brainwashed by the rebels. With the help of Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) a journalist investigating the illegal diamond trade, Vandy and Archer form an uneasy alliance to find Vandy’s family and get the diamond to Archer who can turn it into cash.

The movie packs a tremendous amount into its 2 hours and 20 minutes, but it never feels bloated. We see the devastation of civil war and the brutal guerrilla war tactics of marauding youths. It is gut-wrenching, and unflinchingly realistic. We also see the interconnection of the global diamond trade with regional conflicts, and the need for the diamond cartels to control the supply and keep diamond prices high. And we see a broad portrait of conflict in Africa through the life of Archer as a mercenary soldier. It is a powerful and affecting movie.

Sierra Leone is now peacefully and legally exporting diamonds which account for about one-third of its hard currency exports. While that tiny country is at peace, the brutality of the civil war depicted in the movie is a painful but necessary reminder of other conflicts in Africa, such as the Sudan and Congo.

I wrote a mixed review of Babel here when I saw it, but now that it has won a Golden Globe for Best Drama and is nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, I cannot resist revisiting this movie and why I am disappointed that it got a Best Picture nomination. First, though, I want to recognize what I thought was well done in this movie. The acting was convincing and compelling across the board. The individual scenes were well-written and well-directed. It is the implausibility of two of the three individual stories (and the meaningless way that the stories are connected to each other) that I find maddening.

Spoiler alert if you have not seen “Babel” and want to see it.

One story concerns a deaf Japanese high school girl (played by Rinko Kikuchi) whose mother is dead and who feels disconnected from the world. She searches for physical love to help her cope with her loneliness. This story stands on its own with no problems.

The second story concerns the accidental shooting of Susan (played by Cate Blanchett) traveling in Morocco with her husband Richard (played by Brad Pitt). Stuck in a rural area without access to modern medical facilities, they wait it out while the incident is blown up into a terrorist incident and geopolitical concerns interfere with the arrival of an evacuation. I found the set-up of this story to be implausible, and implausible for no good reason. Susan is shot not so much by accident after all. Two young goat-herders are debating the range of their new rifle and decide to see if it can actually hit that tour bus driving down the road. Of course, it can. These kids have no hatred or fear of foreigners, and while perhaps young and foolish, showed no signs of being so unbelievably stupid that they would actually try to shoot another person to see if a gun had sufficient range to do so. The story of the stuck couple doesn’t have any more complexity than the story of a backpacking accident or any other mishap that lands someone in a medical bind far from help.

But the story that really irritates me in this movie is that of Amelia (Adriana Barraza), the live-in caretaker of Richard and Susan’s two young kids back in California. Barraza, like the other actors, delivers a fine performance. But the plot has her take these two kids to Mexico, without written consent from their parents, and then return over the border in the middle of the night, even though she is an illegal alien and the kids’ parents are obviously wealthy and there would be dozens of other options for her. She wants to get to her son’s wedding, which is totally understandable. The problem is that Richard and Susan are stuck in Morocco dealing with the aftermath of Susan’s shooting, which the entire world has heard about on the news. But, Richard tells her she’ll just have to miss the wedding, there are no other options. He doesn’t tell her, “call our friends the Johnsons, or the Joneses or the Smiths or the babysitters”. She goes to a couple of her friends’ to see if they can watch the kids for the day, but no luck. I’m sorry, but there is just no way that there wouldn’t be the entire wealthy-friends network of Richard and Susan on the doorstep looking to see what they could do for those kids. It’s international news that Richard and Susan are in Morocco with a gunshot wound. There is no way she couldn’t drop those kids at friends of the parents for the day so she could go to the wedding. But let’s grant that particular liberty with reality and assume she does have to take them with her to Mexico. What does she expect to happen as an illegal immigrant, crossing the border with two kids that are obviously not her own? Then, on their crazy return to the States, the young driver successfully eludes the pursuing border patrol by driving off into the brush, but rather than just wait there a bit and continue on their merry way, he dumps Amelia and the kids so that he can “lose” the border patrol. He just did lose them! How is driving out on the road so that he can be found again going to help anything? This series of unbelievable events is what sets up what is supposed to be the most emotionally heart-wrenching aspect of the movie, with the near-death of the kids in the desert and the deportation of the woman who virtually raised them. But I found the situation they put themselves in so impossible to believe that I could not connect with it emotionally at all.

That gun used to shoot Susan? Turns out the Japanese girl’s father gave it to a guide in Morocco on a hunting trip. That adds absolutely nothing to either story. The link between Susan and Richard and the kids in the desert only makes the kids’ story less plausible by putting them more in the public spotlight before the ill-advised cross-border trek. And the title “Babel”, together with the publicity campaign that promised a movie exploring the confusion due to our different languages and cultures, actually has nothing to do with any of the three dramas in the movie. No problem in the movie is exacerbated by mis-communication. People are able to make themselves understood quite well. They just make unbelievably stupid decisions.

It seems there’s been a rash of English post-apocalyptic movies lately: 28 Days Later, V for Vendetta, and now Children of Men, in which the form of the apocalypse is the sudden and complete infertility of the human species. Set in England 18 years after the last human birth, the movie portrays a glum and depressing society in which people have a package from “Quietus” at home that lets them decide when to check out of the terminal human condition. The English, with a stiff upper lip, are apparently faring better than the rest of the world which has collapsed into chaos. Determined to hang on until the bitter end, or until a miracle occurs, England hunts down and deports all immigrants who have fled to the country from the mess outside. Hope for a miracle rests with “The Human Project”, a group of doctors working to cure the infertility problem in some peaceful, isolated location. The Azores are mentioned, but most people don’t even believe the project is real.

Set against this hopeless backdrop, the movie follows the efforts of Julian (Julianne Moore) and a team of pro-immigrant rebels who have roped Julian’s ex-husband Theo (Clive Owen) into getting a pregnant woman (Kee, played by Claire-Hope Ashity) to the coast where they hope she will be picked up by a Human Project boat. There’s not much sense of hope in this movie, yet I found myself very much hoping for Kee to make it. Her journey is treacherous not because people want to kill a pregnant woman, but because the environment is the dangerous near-chaos of the fringes of a police state. The movie satisfactorily addresses the obvious question of why she doesn’t just see some government doctors in England. England, although it bravely “soldiers on”, to quote a billboard in the movie, is too far gone to be a safe or helpful place for what is perhaps humanity’s last best hope.

The movie poses an interesting and different hypothetical situation that creates some eerie images. Schools, no longer necessary, decay into ruin. People, still healthy, go about their business, but all are wondering what is the point if not only civilization, but the species itself, will no longer exist in 40 or 50 years. Children, it is clear, keep us all going.