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There is a scene early in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Golden Globe-winning Babel in which an American tourist played by Brad Pitt, is struggling to drag his freshly-shot wife (Cate Blanchett) off a bus in the middle of the Moroccan desert. His efforts are hindered by another passenger: a fat, curmudgeonly British holidaymaker played by Peter Wight, a character actor who regularly portrays fat and curmudgeonly men in UK television drama.
Brilliant, we thought. The last time we saw Wight he played a butler in the hokiest of whodunit shows, Midsomer Murders. Wight belonged to a secret society called the Pudding Club and eventually turned out to be the killer, but more important than the who was how-he-dun-it.
The butler, you see, bludgeoned his victims to death with a giant spoon.
Alas, Babel does not include a scene where Wight stoves in Pitt’s pretty skull with oversized cutlery. More's the pity. For while its narrative reliance on chaos theory connectedness could easily allow for some form of spoon-assisted homicide, Babel is nothing more than this year’s Crash: a portentous and contrived film that grapples with Big Issues only for them to repeatedly slam its dunderheaded ideas into the canvas.
Though Babel is undeniably handsome and boasts uniformly good performances, a movie that all but tattoos the word IMPORTANT across its face should have more to say. Themes like global interdependence and the web of family tragedies it creates have been better-handled in great films like The Double Life of Veronique and Code Unknown, not to mention an early episode of Midsomer Murders in which DCI Tom Barnaby investigates a series of brutal murders in a sleepy English village apparently caused by a small boy blinking in China.
In a great year for Mexican directors, it seems Inarritu will scoop all the prizes while his countrymen Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón take home the critical plaudits for two of 2006’s real cinematic masterpieces, Pan’s Labyrinth and Children of Men. At least they’re all pals. Here they all are on the Charlie Rose show chatting about all kinds of stuff:
posted: 01/01/06