My memory of the movie isn't exactly fresh -- I saw it when it was released in 2006 -- but maybe I can still try to say something about it. If I'm forgetting anything important, I hope somebody else will correct me. As will become clear, I had a bit lower estimation of the movie than the prevailing opinion, so I'd also be interested if anybody felt differently and wants to talk about why.
As I recall, the set-up is something like this: Two boys, brothers, are playing with a gun in the Moroccan desert and accidentally shoot an American tourist (Cate Blanchett) through the window of a bus driving in the distance. The movie follows four stories connected to these events, which are inter-cut and developed out of sequence with one another:
- The story of the tourist and her husband (Brad Pitt), and his efforts to secure medical attention and transport from the village near the shooting. We understand also that they have been traveling to escape some marital unhappiness; they seem to represent literate, liberal upper-middle-class America and its discontents. Their situation is particularized a bit more than this, though: they are unhappy because their third child has died in infancy.
- The story of the boy who fired the gun and his family, who try to hide as Moroccan police investigate. Let's say the boy is essentially an innocent who is caught up in a political situation that may demand his sacrifice. In the background we discern the responses of the American and Moroccan governments and efforts to defuse a diplomatic situation arising from what people assume is a terrorist incident. (In what may or may not be a canny decision, this story is populated with nonprofessional actors.)
- The story of the American couple's Mexican nanny (Adriana Barraza, whose work here was almost universally praised, with good reason). After the shooting, Brad Pitt's character demands (pretty condescendingly, though we tend to note this and forgive it a bit under the circumstances) that she take care of his two children at their California home longer than planned. But her son is getting married in a small town near Tijuana, and finding no other solution, she takes the children with her into Mexico. The Mexican wedding is a sort of generous interlude that exposes the children to a culture that the movie regards as more "authentic" and at any rate more communal than the whitewashed suburban life they are used to. Things take a different turn when the nanny and her nephew (Gael García Bernal) attempt to bring the children back over the border into the U.S.; she lacks a letter of consent to take the children out of the country. The situation deteriorates until she and the children are lost in the desert without transportation, and things get worse from there. The dominant theme here concerns America's relations to its neighbors, and (again) the effects of governments and their relations on private lives.
- And finally the Japanese story that Rachel asked about. I will have to omit even more significant details here than before, but briefly: this concerns a girl in Tokyo (Rinko Kikuchi) who lives with her father (Kōji Yakusho) after her mother's suicide. She is mute and sexually confused, and she makes awkward overtures to a classmate and to her dentist. At her high-rise apartment, she meets a police detective whom she first takes to be continuing the investigation of her mother's death; she explains that her father wasn't present. She finds out that instead the police are trying to find out how a rifle owned by her father wound up used in a shooting in Morocco. (This is the only narrative link to the three other stories.) She tries to seduce one of the detectives by approaching him unclothed; without giving too much away, I'll say that the resulting scenes are tender and seem to offer the possibility of real human relations for her.
I've tried to give at least some idea of the thematic weight of each story. But there remains the question of what this fourth story is doing here at all. Reviewers were generally unkind to this portion of the movie, or to the decision to include it. I should say that I partly agree but that I also found this part of the movie the most moving, although Adriana Barraza's nanny was also very nice to watch. Perhaps I'm too much of a sucker for the kind of photography used here (borrowed from some work by Christopher Doyle via Lost in Translation, a movie I'm also skeptical of but which shares some of the emotional structure of this part of Babel) or for the hypermodern-Asian-city-as-site-of-alienation trope. But I would also say that in spite of its recognizable sources in other recent movies, this segment appealed to me because it felt less forcibly contrived than the others.
Nonetheless I think Rachel is right to insist on asking why this story is included. Despite its thematic distance from the other stories, it seems to me there are two kinds of connection.
First, I want to suggest (especially for viewers who may not have sat through as many recent "independent" movies as I, for some reason, have) that what we encounter here is a filmmaking cliché about interlocking stories and the powers of chance and arbitrariness. I don't mean to say that all movies with multiple interlocking narrative threads are uninteresting, but in the last decade this mode has become a sort of reflex for self-consciously independent filmmaking. (Think of Magnolia, Crash, Little Children, Pulp Fiction, but also many others. These are to be distinguished sharply from other kinds of multi-narrative construction, like the mode of many Robert Altman films. The Babel model is closer to the construction of a Tom Clancy novel than to Altman's democratic filmmaking, as emerges particularly in considering the place of dialogue in each.) The interest in aleatory narratives similarly appears as a solution to problems of theatricality, but whether it had any validity to begin with, it's also a move that quickly became reflexive. (I think of Run Lola Run and other films directed by Tom Tykwer, also of Julio Medem's movies and, again, many others.)
I'd say that Babel tries to turn these screenwriting reflexes into a way of imagining the post-9/11 global community. Let's say that one of the things movies can do is to give us images for concepts -- sometimes images that make new concepts, in the way that a poem may be thought to produce something for which we don't have a name yet; but sometimes images that encapsulate a certain way of understanding or feeling about something we can already identify. Watching Babel, it seemed to me that the movie's ambition was to provide emotionally-invested images through which people can imagine globalization and especially America's relation to other nations. These would include visual images, but also characteristic stories and persons.
I've already suggested how I think the various stories are trying to shape our imagination of global politics. In terms of this reading I take the Japanese story as a kind of limit-point of the way chance is supposed to operate in the global market. (This, it seems to me, is not a particularly interesting idea; it basically gives "six degrees of separation" a political slant. With one minor difference, I note: Kōji Yakusho has actually travelled to Morocco and given the rifle as a gift, though he didn't directly encounter the family that owned it later.)
The movie's analysis of globalization brings me to the second connection, which is the relationships among the stories' emotional trajectories. I would guess that the filmmakers decided that the ending of a movie about these matters needed to be bittersweet, mixed, and multiple--that a single emotional resolution wasn't sufficient, just as it wasn't adequate to look only at the Americans, Moroccans, or Mexicans. So the movie gives us three endings, trying to balance various affective outcomes (poignant joy or sadness, outrage, detached analysis, tragic acceptance and so on) without letting one predominate. And then it adds this fourth story, which has a single (still bittersweet) emotional trajectory.
Our minds turn things over and try to picture the relation of this one to the others, and I suspect that what mostly happens is that we leave the theatre with this story somehow nonsensically working as an summary of the others, as though somehow this Japan that stands outside the political machinery of the movie but is connected to it by pure chance could then be a satisfactory way of tying the other stories (nations?) together. It's significant that Babel ends on this story. If the movie starts by picturing a global economic network with America dominating but not controlling the scene, it ends by leaving this historical scene altogether and placing us in the posthistorical world of angels -- which, for these filmmakers as for some of their US counterparts, is Tokyo. Personal drama replaces the political entirely, and (though the actors are very fine) the story is mainly an affair of mood. Mood could not be justified in the other three stories, but now that's over, we get to relax, and we still get the satisfaction of imagining that this has something to do with global politics.
But that question of relevance still nags, of course; and if we're not careful we may respond only by saying "it's complex, life is complicated, etc."
***
I've omitted to specify the commercial place of this movie. The terrible word 'middlebrow' was invented to describe more or less this sort of work. More descriptively, this film belongs to the class of prestige cinema funded by motion picture studios because, whether it wins awards or not, it yields a kind of cultural capital. (This is also why Hollywood still interests itself in Shakespeare or adaptations of 19th-century novels.) All the better for them when a movie such as this garners the Oscars it was contrived to win.
***
Why spend so much time talking about a movie that I claim not to care for very much? Talking recently with some friends, I found myself trying to develop a coherent account of an intuition concerning the demand for "serious drama" in recent American movies and television -- a recent industry category that distorts other uses of the word 'drama.' Trying to justify my sense that this genre has to do with authoritarian tendencies, I had to attempt to make explicit what was problematic in this kind of drama's characteristic concerns (personal trauma, for instance) and the kinds of heroic narrative it produces in its blockbuster forms. Someone asked what I had thought of Paul Haggis's 2004 movie Crash, and I tried to suggest why that movie seemed to me cynically contrived in spite of its claim to a liberal humanism. But certain things that are obvious to anybody who watches too many movies may be less so to most audiences; old clichés may seem new, for instance. Of course, newness may not always be a virtue, so it fells to me to try and think about why in fact there is a problem with the habits of thought or representation that might be identified in a movie like Crash.
Babel, it seems to me, is not exactly the same thing as Crash. Both are, and are marketed as, the kind of serious drama that besets the current American cinema, and to some degree European and Latin American film too. Crash traffics in racial conflict and personal trauma; maybe precisely because it's produced in my own country, its contrived, manipulated plotlines seemed more cynical to me. Babel, too, is contrived in this way, and like Crash it lacks, in my estimation, the sense of truth. But I remember it as at least a bit more humane in aspiration, even if the way it represents politics is similarly suspect.
