Babel won tons of awards and tremendous critical acclaim. This tells us that coherent plotting and sensible storytelling are no longer requirements for cinematic accolades. Let's briefly outline some of the irredeemably absurd elements of the story: Morroccan authorities, without benefit of weapon, interviews or any other physical evidence whatsoever are able to track down the previous two owners of a rifle as well as the current owner - a desert goatherder - and locate his family. While they are doing this, with SUVs crawling all over the desert, neither they nor anyone else is able to get an ambulance, a helicopter or even so much as a golf cart to the person who has been wounded. A goatherder hands a high-powered rifle over to his two pre-teen sons with neither instruction nor apparent concern about their safety or anyone else's. Those sons - who are possessed of enough maturity and responsibility to tend the family's herds, give no thought to the possible consequences of using a moving tour bus for target practice. An illegal alien who has cared for two children since birth (a) waits until the day of her son's wedding to make plans to attend, and (b) decides to cross the border back into the U.S. with the two children she cherishes in the middle of both the night and the desert...with her drunken nephew at the wheel.
That's just for starters. The entire movie was rife with this sort of inanity, which made it impossible for us to lend credence to anything the movie had to say. And while what it had to say was ostensibly something about our inability to communicate both interpersonally and across cultures, I'm afraid that we are in agreement that all that actually came out of this mess was an intense xenophobia and the conclusion that we are all - without fail or exception - cosmically stupid.
We are used to suspending our disbelief for the sake of film, but we do expect that if we are asked to do this, the filmmaker provides the courtesy of a storyline and plot that will assist that effort. Babel, however, not only does not provide this, but gives us scenario after scenario that is so overwhelmingly implausible as to thwart one's best efforts to go along with it all.
In the end, the only segment of the movie that possessed any heart or believability was the Japanese story line - and by the end of the movie we still only had about one-fifth of what may have been an interesting story there. Too bad. If they had given us that complete story it couldn't have been anywhere near as awful as what we wound up sitting through.
That's just for starters. The entire movie was rife with this sort of inanity, which made it impossible for us to lend credence to anything the movie had to say. And while what it had to say was ostensibly something about our inability to communicate both interpersonally and across cultures, I'm afraid that we are in agreement that all that actually came out of this mess was an intense xenophobia and the conclusion that we are all - without fail or exception - cosmically stupid.
We are used to suspending our disbelief for the sake of film, but we do expect that if we are asked to do this, the filmmaker provides the courtesy of a storyline and plot that will assist that effort. Babel, however, not only does not provide this, but gives us scenario after scenario that is so overwhelmingly implausible as to thwart one's best efforts to go along with it all.
In the end, the only segment of the movie that possessed any heart or believability was the Japanese story line - and by the end of the movie we still only had about one-fifth of what may have been an interesting story there. Too bad. If they had given us that complete story it couldn't have been anywhere near as awful as what we wound up sitting through.