I finally got around to viewing the highly acclaimed 2006 movie Babel the other night. It was hard to watch in many respects, but it's also a masterful film. Loosely put, it's the story of four families from different parts of the world connected by a single act of reckless boyhood stupidity, the consequences of which ramify throughout the movie. It's The Bridge of San Luis Rey as if written by William Shakespeare and put on screen.
For those who may not have seen it, a Japanese big game hunter gives a high powered rifle to his Moroccan guide as an expression of gratitude for the guide's service. The guide sells it to a goat-herder friend of his who gives it to his young sons, one of whom on impulse uses it to shoot at a distant tour bus, striking an American tourist (Cate Blanchett). The injured woman's two children in San Diego are meanwhile being cared for by a Mexican nanny who takes them across the border to her son's wedding and winds up getting lost in the desert.
These events all happen over the course of a day and the film focusses on members of each family as they struggle with the effects of this and other tragedies in their lives. The decision by the boys to shoot at the bus has many interwoven results, some of which are horrific, some of which are blessings, and most of which are completely unforeseeable. One interesting aspect of the film is that all the main characters are good people who get caught in agonizing predicaments, not because any of them do bad things, but mostly because people around them, and they themselves, do really dumb things.
An interesting twist in Babel is that although there are big name actors (Brad Pitt plays Cate Blanchett's husband) they're not the heroes of the movie. The real heroes, unusual as it may be in movies, are several of the secondary characters. The Moroccan tour guide and a Japanese police officer display a goodness and moral strength that change the lives of people they touch. This was for me one of the most important messages of the film - real heroes are just ordinary people who do the right thing and don't expect anything in return. Another important mesage was that human goodness has a redemptive and healing effect on others.
Babel has, perhaps, only two shortcomings. It contains some gratuitously explicit sexuality, which demeans the viewer, in my opinion, and it creates two or three mysteries which are never satisfactorily resolved. We're left to speculate on why, for example, the daughter of the Japanese hunter lies about the manner of her mother's suicide and what she wrote on the note to the police officer. Nevertheless, Babel tells an otherwise wonderful story about average people caught in the trap of being human in a fallen world.
RLC
