Themes Runneth Over

What do I have to say about Babel that hasn't already been said? Well, let's start with this: Its Oscar win for Best Music Score was well-deserved; its nominations in all the other categories (besides Supporting Actress) were not. It's overlong, over-ambitious, and over-portentious. The score, though, is a thing of beauty. Unobtrusive yet supportive, it never feels forced, unlike Philip Glass's over-the-top histrionics for Notes on a Scandal. Best of all, if you closed your eyes and just listened to the sound, you can actually identify which story you're in purely by the music alone. Each location has its own distinctive sound, which is just that little bit different from the other sections to stand out, yet not jarringly; everything blends into a seamless whole. Visually, this is echoed as well through Rodrigo Prieto's understated cinematography, and like with the music, you can instantaneously identify the location through its look.

Iñárritu's stuff has always been interesting, but here he seems to be stuffing so many grand Themes into a movie that it ends up unfocused and overblown. It starts off well, with good introductions to two Moroccan boys, but as the multiple story threads wallow in their despair and inevitably collapse together, you start thinking if any of it really matters. Most of the cast rarely seem to have anything outstanding to do, and their characters unfortunately seem to be nothing more than spokespersons for particular kinds of suffering as opposed to fully-fleshed human beings. And no, making someone like the ethereal Cate Blanchett pee in a pan is not equivalent to making them human. Out of everyone involved, the Best Supporting Actress nominees Adriana Barraza and Kikuchi Rinko truly stand out for investing their roles with real depth and feeling.

For a movie that's ostensibly about the lack of human communication in the modern world (along with every other Grand Theme out there), it's kind of sad that the story thread that's the most affecting is about a mute Japanese girl. Not to say that it's irredeemably bad, it's just that with the pedigree of the filmmakers and cast involved, expectations are naturally higher, and it simply fails to meet them, apart from occasional moments of pure cinematic brilliance that make me want to applaud. Too bad about the rest of the movie around them - it just ain't good enough.