Thoughts on "Babel": A 5* Flick!

What a great film, heavy but amazing. I didn't realize that Babel was an Inaritu film or I would have made a point to see it sooner. I love this kind of thing, and my enjoyment of it supports what my Ballard friends say about me: I only like movies that are heavy and depressing. Yeah, so.

By many accounts I'm a movie snob, but really my selectivity comes from the belief, or feeling, rather, that I don't really need to be entertained. I'm entertaining enough to myself, I guess, and don't really enjoy being a spectator but a participant, and in a really good drama you are fully engaged and become a part of the story. Additionally, if I'm going to spend nearly two hours on a friggin couch or in a theater (dropping almost 10 bucks) I want to learn something. In dramas you hopefully learn something about the human condition, or even just a small glimpse into something new or different.

Not long into the film I new that it was an Inaritu film because it had such an Amores Perros feel to it, and it cast Gael Garcia Bernal.

Here's what it was about to me:

--showed the near hopelessness of situations: in all four of the storylines the characters find themselves in near hopeless situations, and you are generally led to feel that they are brought about by ridiculous circumstances.

--the ability of humanity to overcome such insurmountable problems. The resiliency of the human spirit. And a glimpse into a few insurmountable problems.

--in each of the storylines the characters had huge communication barriers to overcome, but ultimately they prevailed. Sort of.

--the interconnectedness of all persons regardless of their place or condition: the major settings are these: inner city Tokyo, the outback of Morocco, suburbs of LA and the remote border zone between US-Mexico.

Here's what some scholars have come up with of interest to me:

In the story of the Tower of Babel, as taken from the Book of Genesis, the people of the world are all united and speak a common language, and they begin to build a tower to reach the heavens and become godlike themselves. God, seeing this, decides to confuse the language of the people and destroy the tower. When the people could no longer understand each other they gave up work on the tower and spread out to different parts of the world. It also refers to the connections -or lack thereof- that come through the use of language. In each storyline the characters struggle with surviving and self-identification based on misunderstanding through a language barrier. This film ultimately looks at the fact that we are all intimately connected on a life-and-death level, yet the trivialities of language and misunderstandings break us apart. ---from The Internet Movie Database.