Movies made of vignettes
17/12/07 23:51 Filed in: Cable
Guys
Finally saw Babel and it turned out to be kind of interesting and kind of disappointing.
There was a time in my life when I would have written something like this about it: "an intriguing narrative that threads together skeins of thinly related stories to offer a narrative that's greater than the whole."
But that was before a flood of these kind of films had begun to submerge the whole, single-word title, multi-storyline, interwoven timeline film with big actors willing to take a small part for their art, in a celluloid flood of earnestness and social relevance.
Beginning with Traffic and moving on through Crash and Syriana we have been asked to share a world in which wildly divergent, tenuously linked events sinuously thread together coincidences, relationships and curiously interesting people in weird situations into a single, somewhat coherent story.
None of these movies are bad, but the style is now so well established and programmed that it begins to look like a pin-striped, double-breasted suit. Not an unpleasant thing, but not something you want to be caught wearing too often.
The story of Babel nominally belongs to Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, but the real stars are Boubker Ait El Caid as the young Moroccan boy who shoots Blanchett's character and Rinko Kikuchi the mute Japanese girl who wrestles with her relationship with her father.
Alejandro González Iñárritu's direction is sure and confident, but he's trying to corral a story that literally ranges around the world, and it's hard to sustain interest in the vignette featuring Adriana Barraza, which is a capably executed story on its own that seems to have made its way into the movie under dubious circumstances.
By the end of Babel, it all seems like too much of a good thing, too much industrious acting, too much meaningful writing and not enough narrative dedicated to advancing any single thread of a story that deserved more focus and fewer beginning, protracted middles and unsatisfying ends.
In photo, Boubker Ait El Caid in Babel.
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