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Toronto Film Fest Preview! Moriarty Deciphers Inarritu's Brilliant BABEL!!
Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
There are three guys right now who seem to be hitting their artistic stride at the same time, and what I find fascinating is how there seems to be the same sort of creative comraderie among them as there was among the giants of the ‘70s, making me wonder if this is part of the secret. Guillermo Del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron, and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu are all gifted filmmakers who have been doing interesting work up till now, but this year, each of them has a film coming out during the last four months of the year that could be said to be defining for who they are and who they want to be. That’s heady stuff, exciting times for artists. And to see it happen to these three guys at once, all three of them deserving it, it’s pretty exhilarating as a film fan.
Inarritu’s film is the first to hit the screen, opening in October and also playing the Toronto Film Festival soon. This may have won Best Director at Cannes, but it didn’t take the Palm D’Or, and if Ken Loach’s WHEN THE WIND SHAKES THE BARLEY is better than this, it’ll be the best film Loach has ever made. BABEL may feature a few movie stars in key roles, but this is anything but a typical Hollywood production. It is the organic next step in the fruitful collaboration between Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga. I thought AMORES PERROS was a promising film, although a little rough around the edges. 21 GRAMS was a film that is really hard to sit through, but not because it’s poorly made. In fact, it’s because it’s so good at what it does that it’s a difficult watch. It just tells a story about pain and emotional shutdown, and as a result, it didn’t work on me in the same way that AMORES PERROS did. It didn’t connect with me the same way.
So walking into BABEL, I expected it to be well-made, but what I wasn’t expecting was the way the film emotionally devastated me. It is a powerful film experience, expertly acted on all fronts, and it makes an important point about the way we are all connected and the way we create the things that keep us apart. It speaks to the most basic things that unite us as human beings sharing a world.
Susan (Cate Blanchett) and Richard (Brad Pitt) are traveling together in Morocco. There’s a lot that goes unspoken between them in the film, and it’s never exactly clear what drove them to be in this spot at this time. They’re running from some problems, some recent pain, and they’re trying to figure out if they still fit together in any way. They remind me of the couple in Paul Simon’s haunting “Hearts & Bones,” staying adrift just ahead of the tidal wave of their marriage. When fate puts its finger on this couple in a random, horrible second that completely changes their lives, it leaves a ripple, and that ripple disrupts other lives in Morocco, in Los Angeles, in Mexico, in Japan. People who look at that amazing trailer for the film and write it off as “just another one of those movies like TRAFFIC and SYRIANA” are going to deny themselves a powerful emotional ride. This is not some detached cereberal exercise. This is a movie that connects immediately, that pulls you into each of the different lives we see, and when it wants to hurt you, it does it with the precision and force of a bullet wound.
At the film’s start, it seems like the storyline that is most disconnected from everything else is the one in Japan. Koji Yakusho is a fairly well-known Japanese actor, with films like CURE, THE EEL, PULSE, SÉANCE, and WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE to his credit, and his role here is offers up a side of him I don’t think I’ve seen in anything else. He plays the father of Chieko, a deaf girl, played by the riveting Rinko Kikuchi, who seems to be in a free fall of her own following the death of her mother. As the police hound her father for initially unexplained reasons, she’s watching girls her age experiment with their sexuality, but every time she meets a boy she’s attracted to, the sign language turns him off, marking her as damaged goods. Kikuchi’s performance is discomfiting stuff, edgy and dark and deeply sad. The way their storyline folds into the rest of the film just underlines the tragedy of things. Don’t expect a giant melodramatic bolt of lightning like in CRASH. This film reaches deeper, and it dares to be subtle and sober about the way it makes its points. The resolution of the Tokyo storyline has haunted me ever since I saw it a month and a half ago, and I’m nto even sure I can fully articulate what it is that hit me so hard.
Richard and Susan’s kids back in America are being watched by their Mexican housekeeper, who’s in the country illegally. She wants to go home to Mexico for one day for her son’s wedding, but there’s no one who can take the children. She sees no other choice but to take them with her, and the way things spiral out of control as a result is horrifying to contemplate as a parent. One wrong decision after another leading to something too awful to even consider. This was the material in the film that disturbed me the most viscerally, especially the idea that Susan and Richard are a world away during the entire horrible chain of events, unaware it’s even going on. It made me physically tense, like every nerve ending was tied in a knot. And just when it all gets too be too much to breathe, Inarritu cross-cuts to the story of two boys in Morocco, given a rifle by their father to use in chasing predators away from their small herd of goats. Again... he illustrates the way small choices snowball, and by the time one boy reaches a wrenching tearful epiphany, it’s impossible not to feel for them, no matter what they’ve done. When you talk about humanist filmmaking, this is a perfect example. I would hold this up next to the finest work of Satyajit Ray in the way it removes us from our own cultural context and effortlessly slips us into the skin of someone whose experience is completely outside our own. As Susan lays bleeding in some nameless Moroccan town, her husband desperately trying to find someone who can help, some way to get her back within the grasp of Western medicine, he practically crumples from the sheer frustration and powerlessness of it all. As our world becomes more interconnected, we begin to run up against the basic issue of common ground, of common language, of common experience. You can either see this world in terms of the things that make us different or the things that make us the same, and which one of those worldviews you embrace can change the world.
Rodrigo Prieto has a painter’s soul, and his work as cinematographer here helps Inarritu with his goal of making us feel each of these lives. And instead of painting each world as something totally different, as in TRAFFIC, Prieto underlines the idea that the same light shines on us all. Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione share the editing credit, and their feather touch keeps this from feeling like anything other than a cohesive whole. Finally, there’s the remarkable score by Gustavo Santaolalla, and his work on THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES and BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN have positioned him as one of the more orginal voices in film music right now, a distinction that will only be furthered by his contributions to this film.
I have no doubt this film will do well in its screenings at Telluride and Toronto, but don’t be fooled into thinking this is a film that will only play to festival crowds or to art house audiences. This is a film that could be understood implicity by anyone, any audience, and that’s the point. This film manages to break past language to speak directly to us in whatever common tongue we’ve all forgotten, and it does something that great art can do better than almost anything else: it unites. It left me with a remarkable high, and it’s one of the most compelling pictures I’ve seen so far this year.
I’ll be back with more of the reviews I’ve let back up tonight and tomorrow and all the way through this holiday weekend, so I hope I see you all back here then.
"Moriarty" out.
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sucked. One of the worst movies I've seen in a long time. The non-linear storyline was superfluous and the acting seemed over-the-top at times. Each character was an idiot I didn't care about. The worst "well reviewed" film I've seen in a while.
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We're in for a truly remarkable last quarter of 2006 with The Fountain, Pan's Labyrinth, Children of Men, and now this.
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21 Grams is absurdly underrated (by everybody except the Voice's J. Hoberman). Babel is a fairly rote slice of anti-American nonsense a la Michael Haneke's Cache. The Americans are smug, self-absorbed as evil, and the brown people are long-suffering, stoical, and anguished. There's also a weird skein about an exhibitionistic deaf-mute Japanese nymphomaniac in a plaid schoolgirl skirt. Leave it to two Mexican guys to come up with that as their representation of The Orient.
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KES is better than BABEL by a long, long, LOOOOONG shot, so THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY doesn't exactly have to reach those delirious heights that KES did. BABEL I think will get more praise in the short run, but THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY is a grower, and one that I return to thinking about more and more. They're both great, though.
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... I completely disagree about this film being remotely anti-American, and I'd love to hear your reading on CACHE that makes that an anti-American piece, as well. I think you're stretching like Reed Richards, man.
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Because it looks trite and manipulative and like Syriana 2.
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...Cache is anti-American? You'd have to be pretty goddamn sensitive and/or paranoid to start reading Algerian-sympathetic texts as anti-American. And yeah, Rindain is OTM. Oscar-baiting season should be pretty remarkable this year.
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I loved the trailer for this film and can't wait to see it. Twenty one gram's was very well made and I think Gael Garcia Bernal, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchet are always worth watching. Anyone who hasn't seen Cache should look out for it, it's quite disturbing and the best thing Juliette Binoche has done in years
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How very true! You hit the nail on the head with that one.
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are becoming more and more effete as the months roll by. Any day now, he'll start shopping for a sex change in Thailand.
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I cant wait to see Babel as the storyline seems far more interesting. Personally I just wasnt impressed with 21 Grams I just didnt think the story was all that special. Also Cache anti-American?? What a joke. Also how is this movie anti- American?
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The only Haneke film I have seen and definitely the last. The
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Don't mind Heywood. He's obviously in the same school of paranoid xenophobes who thought The Ant Bully was communist. Thanks again Massawyrm. I disagree with you Mory about amores Perros only having promise though. Grnasted I haven't see nthe film in a couple years but at the time I thought it was perfection and I regard it not only as one my all time favorites, but as one of the best movies ever made.
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posts on Fark too, I believe, and he's just as trollish there. He's the type to approach every piece of news/entertainment by aksing "how anti-American is this going to be?" before anything else.
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How can you not like 21 Grams- its got Naomi Watts's nipples in it. The 21 Grams from the title actually means the weight of my sperm after creaming my pants at the sight of Naomi's beautiful breasts.
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If your title was a reference to the "Flames on Optimus = Nipples on Batsuit" stuff, well then I bow down to you and say well played sir. well played. eiither way you're right. loves me some namomi nipple.
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When I saw 21 Grams in theatre, I thought it had excellent acting, and good, moody cinematography and directing. The non-linear narrative was off-putting at first, but then I got a hold of it and was entertained. Immediately after leaving the theatre I thought it was a good movie. But as a I was constructing the storylines of the movie into a linear narrative in my head, in order to understand all that happened in the film, I realized something: 21 Grams is just a generic soap opera thriving to be "edgy", ridden with lame cliches. The fact that it's edited in a non-linear manner does a pretty good job of hiding this, but once you play out the events in a linear manner, it becomes obvious how lame the story actually is. So 2 hour after seeing the film I actually had a much lesser opinion of it. The film got progressively worse the more I thought about it. And I couldn't help to think that Inarritu had written the film in a linear manner, but when he cut it together he realized what a lame and cliched piece of derivative crap it was, the only option to save the film and make it into something that would come off as "substantial" and "real", would be to cut it to pieces and throw events on the screen at a random order. Amores Perros was a truly great movie, 21 Grams just wanted to be one, but failed. Babel sounds really good, thought.
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Seems like everyday I come here theres a new film everyone hates that I love. I thought Cache was brilliant, subtle, and wonderfully done movie. Really thoughtfully done film.
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Exactly that is what I have always thought but nobody has ever agreed with me about 21 Grams. Linear the story just wasnt that impressive to me. Babel really does sound good though.
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Haven't talked about him. He's one of the reason (with of course Innaritu) that I want to go see this!
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i agree with moriarty big time about the subtext/impact of a film like this. i don't think of it as manipulative - i think of it as a magnifying glass focused on a squirming ant. forget syriana and traffic and all that. the idea that one wrong word at this point in time could set off a ripple effect that has no boundaries is paralyzing in its horror. one woman at the border, one guy in line at the airport, who knows anymore what could set the world off?
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i should ease up before pulling the trigger. i didn't really mean that the plot of this film is predicated on 'one word causing terrorism'. i meant that it seems to illustrate the tenuous web that connects cultures now who really don't want to be connected. having traveled in third world countries, especially as someone seen as an imperialist, just watching the trailer for this film put me right back in some scary places. i was held at gunpoint - and i mean assault rifle gunpoint - in a back room at the taj mahal while my traveling companion screamed at the guards in hindi. i don't even know what she said. what if she had said the wrong thing? what IS the wrong thing and how would you know? a tenuous web, indeed.
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I don't want to have "a powerful emotional ride." I'm denying myself that. It's who I am. It's sacrifice and it's my gift to you all. So, it's just another one of those films like Traffic and Syriana. Now I must take my leave, I got a squirrel peakin'.
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this is why i come here. this year's second half looks like a thrill. while i really like traffic, mori pointed out what could be better and.... this review sells the movie as something better. sounds like it features magnolian truth, actually. it's getting interesting how films -not out of marketing reasons- try to integrate some sort of globality. if there's a medium, that can express complex CONNECTION the best it is CINEMA. wow...i'm stunned. as a matter of fact i've yet to see innaritus previous films. the only thing i saw from him was the montage he did for these 11 short films for 9/11 that featured little glimpses of a man falling down the WTC. it was really good...
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And let me just say the acting was really fantastic. The scene where Sean Penn tells the doctor that the hospitalcan only help him "die better", really fantastic. Naomi Watts was so believable, it was like you were really watching this womans life completely fall apart. It was devastating and I think the film was very well done. I also came to conclude that if Del Toro had blonde hair and blue eyes, he would be indistinguishable from Brad Pitt..Lucky bastards the lot of them!
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A few days ago a friend and I were discussing this, and came to the conclusion that it is possible that he abuses the technique. If the had directed the Star Wars trilogies, the series would have started with the "I am your father" scene... Seriously though, the film sounds very promising.
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are two of the most longwinded, boring and tediusly overhyped movies I have seen in along time. I liked that Burt Monroe film very much, even though it had a yeah right quality too it. Everyone at cannes thought babel would walk away with the top prize. that was before ken loach came along and Stole their thunder.
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I wanted to see The Departed at the festival. Thanks to this being about the only notable entry I'm not even bothering to go this year. TIFFOG. Toronto International Film Festival of Gayness.
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Far be it from me to attack those who legitimately critique the United States, whether it be Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9-11 or Lars in the underrated Manderlay. I DO oppose cheap, easy, knee-jerky anti-Americanism as seen in Dogville, Cache and Babel. Here, stereotypes are relied upon that make the audience feel, "Yes, yes, I'm horrible...I drive an SUV, I watch Extreme Makeover Home Edition, and my fridge is way too big. I must do penance for my First World privilege." Far more interesting are movies that actually question our situation in unexpected ways--like Michael Haneke's great, and insanely underrated, TIME OF THE WOLF, which imagines what it might be like to live in a First World country if suddenly a situation like Rwanda's or Bosnia's broke out overnight. Compared to a movie like that, Babel is flaccid and lazy. That's all I'm saying. I'm not a neocon, and no matter what that other guy says, I never posted on "Fark"--I don't even know what that is.
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Cache is about the relationship between Alegerians and the French. Where does America come into this. And how is Babel a film about global issues have to do with anti any country. I dont get what youre saying.
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brad pitt has his critics but the guy is a brilliant actor fight club and snatch anyone??? Oi need a carraran farr me maaaam
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to see movies that don't have happy endings anymore. Does this one?
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Inarritu and Arriaga keep things slightly ambiguous and don't feel the need to tie up all of the loose ends with a pretty bow at the end.
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I mean emotionally, I didn't feel anything for most of these characters. The movie was good, but nothing great. I didn't get an interconnectedness vibe from it either. It just seemed like a few interesting stories that were somewhat connected through that one family.
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As far as a movie going experience, Babel can be commended for being an original one. It is important to state up front that the movie is good. This being said, I had problems with the film. What I liked about Babel is so important that, by default, Babel can’t help, but be one of the best films of 2006. It is just too relevant and thoughtfully constructed to ignore. Babel is not about Brad Pitt or Bernal or Blanchett. The film has the surprising ability to rise above the stars in it. Performances aside, Babel brings us highs and lows that have not been emulated before on screen.
Babel had the cast and director to make it a must see for the cinematic devout. Film can be linked to theology for those appreciating the humanity altering facets of the narrative more than the fantasy appeal. It’s a perfect medium for enrapturing people with the complexities they peripherally encounter. Immigration and global politics are central to the plot of the film. Morocco, Mexico, America and Japan are sickly alike without knowing it. Barriers, both physical and metaphysical, stop the players of this film from truly understanding one another. The characters incredible desire to relate to one another permeates to a grander spectrum in this film.
This was not a star driven film. The highest paid actors in the film, did perform accordingly, but to say they owned the film is false. This film was about Yussef, Cheiko, and what it means to be American today. Babel demonstrates the best of intentions can often lead to suffering. This has been so apparent by our bumbling administration and is just a classically tragic reality of humanity. We may not know what were doing, but once we say we do, how do we turn back? Pitt and Blachett purposefully take a back seat in this film. What happens to them is central, but the culmination of events preceding their position supercedes their plight. They are helpless to the events of the past. Circumstance is the villain in this film.
I have fought with too many people about immigration. I can’t help but think of where we live as a giant lollipop. The sun licks away the flavor of unfortunate nations. If there is opportunity to enrich the flavor of a neighboring patch of our lollipop, how can we let their flavor go unappreciated by the cold sun? We have to grow beyond our own supposed potential. Babel concentrates on how sweet things once were. Comfort and celebration are only a single event from pain and desperation. Things can change too quick not to appreciate the good. Having gotten that point across explicitly, this film achieves greatness.
Alejandro González Iñárritu directed this film. I loved Amores Perros and I should see 21 Grams again. He brings very intricate plots to life and is known for having especially impacting music to accompany his particular visuals. I was distracted by the theme from Deadwood suspiciously around the climax. I didn’t care when certain storylines resolved. I wanted more Bernal, Pitt and Blanchett. However, feeling what being deaf was like moved me. I was touched by what brotherhood can represent. I actually felt like an exhausted, dehydrated Mexican housekeeper stranded in the desert. The likeness to reality found in the film is startling and can draw you in stronger than most entertainment.
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Moriarty, I usually agree with you, but this movie felt so... forced. I didn't feel anything that happenned on this movie as a natural thing, I could almost see the writer going "Hum... let's fuck these characters up a little more... shall we put the kids in, say, the desert? Yeah that's it... And then the Mexican lady will be arrested, that's it!" It all felt pointless to me, and the complete lack of humour or intention except the accumulation of tense and horrid situations one after another... I didn't like 21 GRAMS either, for the same reasons, although I can say both ar good films and with lots of excellent things on them. It just didn't work for me.
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