Spin Doctor Inarritu and the Global Lolocaust

Babel (2006)

Rating ... F (8)

If it ain't broke, don't fix it; Oscartrash director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu returns with yet another fragmented melodrama where several seemingly disparate storylines slowly intertwine before developing into outright hysteria, with a maximum of blue-in-the-face "dramatic" acting and a modicum of insight. After last year's face-palm fiasco at the Academy, I'd call Babel a Crash redux if Inarritu hadn't pioneered the shlock style himself. By this point it is clear that Oscar films are not those who rise above simple-mindedness and pointlessness; they're the ones who go to the greatest lengths to conceal its existence.

There are four separate stories in Babel, and as is becoming customary in films that flaunt their artificial sense of connectivity, the stories arbitrarily overlap, regardless of the fact the characters from one story do not have meaningful interaction with characters in the others. As usual Inarritu toys with the chronology, and as usual it's merely a gimmick; the narrative is equally inane in all forms - forwards, backwards or jumbled up. In Morocco, the upper-class Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett take a vacation to a podunk village whose language they don't even speak ("to be alone," Pitt states dumbly, when prompted of why), before getting shot by two local boys testing the range on their rifle. In Mexico, irrelevantly, Pitt and Blanchett's nanny attends her son's wedding with the kids she's supervising, and in Japan irrelevantly across the globe, a deaf girl experiences sexual frustration.

Like a true Oscar contender, Babel belongs to the school of drama without development. Each story is conspicuously contrived to result in melodramatic bouts of moaning and wailing - none more so than a laughably tense border crossing and its aftermath. (Pitt's Mexican nanny attempts to bluff border patrol that the two white children in her car are her nieces, rather than telling them - I dunno - that she's their nanny?) The story in Japan at least has some interest in understanding its character, but that well runs dry rather quickly and Inarritu repeatedly resorts to technical pomp by cutting out the sound - because she's deaf geddit? - and razzle-dazzling audiences with strobe light display.

The points of order on Inarritu's thematic agenda range from despicable to mind-bogglingly stupid. He complacently smuggles in an unnecessary tangent during the first half of the film that involves incest in the Moroccan village. We are not offered reasons for its occurrence or resolution of the subplot - it is simply something to take at face value as daily village life. Am I supposed to be impressed at the sheer volume of global diversity Inarritu can simplify into melodrama? Minutes later, Brad Pitt flags down a minivan to locate a hospital for his wife, but fails because he cannot speak the language of the driver, which for the remainder of the film stands unparalleled in its dumbfounding, literal advocacy of one-language-ism. Perhaps one day Inarritu will learn to be creative, rather than being creative about faking his lack of anything worth saying.