After seeing "Babel" last night with a UHall group, I find it even more curious that "Children of Men" wasn't nominated for Best Picture. But I'll get to that in a minute.
One of the things I noticed about " Babel" had to do with the presence--and absence--of mothers. The woman who gets shot in Morocco (the always wonderful Cate Blanchett) is a mother mourning the loss of a dead child, but she's also an absent mother who allows her illegal immigrant nanny to do all the nurturing of her two other children; the deaf-mute Japanese girl howls silently for affection (okay, sex or at very least physical contact) and her mother shot herself in the head (and the girl found the body); the mother of the two boys in Morocco is rendered almost invisible by the culture in which she lives.
I'm not quite sure what ot make of this observation--I'm not sure the movie does much with it, either. In fact, there's a lot in that movie, too much, in fact, to be handled adequately. A lot of the people in our group thought that the movie was...well, "pretentious" was one word people used; "over-wrought" was another; "contrived" was yet another. I think this is pretty harsh criticism and I'm willing to give the movie more points for attempting something Big.
"Children of Men" attempts something Big, too, and succeeds far more fully than does Babel (or the other movies that were nominated, for that matter). On the one hand, CofM is basically a chase movie (will they get away, will they escape); but it's also a meditation about Otherness, about community, about nation...
The problem for Cuaron's movie, I think, is that it's too close to home. The people in that movie all look like Us; England is too similar, it's all too eerily "us" and not enough "them." In "Babel," however, despite the attempts to show that we're all connected, all the bad things that happen seem to happen Somewhere Else, to people Far Away. Even the scenes in the US desert just north of the Mexican border, or the scenes with Blanchett and Pitt...all seem Other and thus safer.
I haven't seen all the movies that have been nominated for BP this year but a glance at the titles does seem to suggest that these are movies that are...safe. Quirky, maybe (Little Miss...), slightly risky (the Japanese focus for Eastwood, but c'mon, it's Eastwood, how risky is that?), really gory (Scorese, natch), but... safe.
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2 comments:
I generally agree- it seemed that Babel had a good theme- barriers of communication and the ways in which we try to break through and establish contact with another human, and I thought that the movie was incredibly well executed. The shots were beautiful, the acting was great, it was just the actual plot that seemed to be lacking. It was as if the writers couldn't quite agree on a movie and so sort of took all of their mini-tragedies and loosely connected them all. The basic idea was interesting and the movie was good... but plot is really key to making a movie great. As a result, I don't think this should win Best Picture. I agree that Children of Men should have been nominated. Ohhh well...
I was surprisingly content with Babel seeing as how I was going into the movie with low expectations of it. I actually liked that the movie was "too close to home" because I feel that a lot of movies lose their effect because they are trying to be some abstract piece of work when I find this movie's simplicity was integral to its foundation. I also liked the fact that the ending was a joyous one because most endings I feel try to impose some kind of tragedy in order to make it seem more life-like. I find more and more films nowadays inject this tragic influence just to evoke some sort of reaction from the audience and its quite rare that in attempting to illustrate a realistic portrayal of life, not many movies have a happy ending as this one does. However, I do not think it should win BP seeing as how other films have more of a defining plot but I do think Babel is a qualifying contender in the running.
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