BABEL: Big Oscar Loser is a Real Winner

Babel, according to the story in the Bible, is the place where Noah’s descendants tried to build a tower up to heaven. God did not look kindly on this display of human arrogance and punished the builders by causing each of them speak in a different language. This created confusion and brought an end to the building project. It also scattered and disconnected the people across the planet.

It’s the confusion and disconnect caused by language that lies at the heart of BABEL. Even when the characters are speaking the same language they still fail to communicate because they don’t listen to one another.

Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has crafted a complex narrative out of four separate story threads, each set in a different part of the world. The film jumps with unsettling abruptness between the Moroccan desert, the suburbs of San Diego, Baja California in Mexico, and the urban jungle of central Tokyo, and each location is apparently unconnected to all the others.

Not only are they all separated by space, but also by time. The perception that all the stories are running in parallel to one another comes under increasing challenge as the story lines unfold. No sooner are we able to begin making tentative connections between them than we are forced to reassess what we think we know because it is not at all clear when these events are occurring in relation to each other.

It’s a device that Inarritu used to brilliant effect in his previous film “21 Grams.” And BABEL similarly demands your full attention.

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett provide the anchor for these seemingly disparate storylines. They play Richard and Susan Jones, travelling with a busload of British and French tourists through the barren valleys and mountains of Morocco.

It soon becomes clear that they are a couple in crisis although the cause of their problems is unclear. They allude to it without really talking about it. She is unable to articulate her anger, and he can’t explain why he did whatever it was that he did which has made her so upset.

While we are trying to understand the dynamics of their relationship we are also attempting to establish their connection to a couple of young Moroccan boys tending their family’s herd of goats on an inhospitable desert mountainside, and playing with their father’s newly acquired high powered rifle.

And how do these two story strands connect with Amelia (a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominated Adriana Barraza), a middle aged Mexican woman and live-in nanny for a young American brother and sister? She’s trying unsuccessfully to find someone to take them for her so her nephew Santiago (Gael Garcia Bernal) can drive her back into Mexico to attend her son’s wedding?

Most confusingly of all – what could possibly be the connection between these three strands and Cheiko, (Rinko Kikucki, also nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar) a teenage deaf mute volleyball player, living with her father in a high rise apartment building in Tokyo, and mourning the mysterious death of her mother?

To reveal anymore of the plot would be to spoil what is a compelling and complex web of relationships.

Pitt and Blanchett are the names above the title, but their performances are more than equalled by their lesser known co-stars. Barraza and Kikucki are outstanding in their portrayal of women driven to desperation by their circumstances. It was only the fierceness of the competition in their category

which denied one of them the gold statuette on Oscar night.

BABEL was up for seven Academy Awards at the 2007 ceremony but took home only one, for Best Original Score. Director Inarritu was unfortunate in being nominated for Best Director in the same year that Martin Scorcese was also up for the award for directing his best piece of work in years.

Inarritu’s intricate and thought provoking tapestry of situations and people forces us to recognise the narrow, fragile rail upon which each of our lives runs, and how it can so easily be derailed by the random and unthinking action of another.  

It also challenges our expectation that if our well ordered life is suddenly thrown into chaos, we will be able to rely on those around us to help, whether that’s our spouse, our parents, our friends, our government, or simply our fellow human beings. Are we right to expect more from those with whom we share a language and a culture, and less from those we regard as foreign?

The answers BABEL offers are unexpected and sometimes disturbing, but always thought provoking. This is a film whose images and characters will stay with you long after the final credits have rolled.

FOUR MEN AND A PRAYER: a prayer won't cut it, this film needs divine intervention!

This 1938 misfire from the usually dependable John Ford is best enjoyed if viewed as a live-action cartoon rather than the adventure mystery it's intended to be.
I found that watching it as if it were a big budget condensed version of one of those Saturday morning serials put out by Republic in the 1930s and 40s made it easier to tolerate the caricature characters, ethnic stereotypes and ridiculous plot.
A very young David Niven, George Sanders, Richard Greene and William Henry are the titular four men although, in truth, Greene looks so young that Three Men and a Youth might be a more honest title. He looks even younger than Henry who's playing his kid brother, and certainly not old enough to have obtained employment as a diplomat at the British Embassy in Washington DC. As for saddling him with responsibility for playing Loretta Young's love interest, let's just say 'Three Men, a Youth, and a Cradle Snatcher' would have made for an even more honest title. Miss Young's game attempts to appear besotted by Greene's pre-manly charms are considerably less than convincing.
Other than servicing 20th Century Fox's efforts to build Greene as a romantic leading man, she's pretty much superfluous to the story. She's not even effective as the love interest since Greene's character spends most of the movie rebuffing her amorous advances with the intensity of a 19th
century student at Oxford whose stroll to the crease, cricket bat in hand, is interrupted by a flighty young thing wanting to give him a kiss for luck.
The film starts out promisingly enough, with the court martial of Colonel Loring Leigh of the British Indian Army for a military blunder that's cost the lives of 90 soldiers. As Leigh is played by

C.Aubrey Smith he obviously can't be guilty. With his ramrod posture, stiff upper lip and British integrity oozing from every pore, Smith only ever portrayed characters of the highest moral fibre, so clearly there's something fishy going on. When, shortly afterwards he's found dead from an apparent suicide it's left to his four sons to solve the mystery and clear his name.
Which is where it all starts getting very silly and slapdash.
The sons split up to search for witnesses, with two heading back to India and the other two taking the boat to South America. Now 1930s Hollywood was never going to win any awards for accuracy in its representation of other countries and other cultures, but the stereotyping here is particularly lazy and offensive. According to 20th Century Fox's worldview, India and South America are indistinguishable from North Africa and both are peopled entirely by swarthy, shifty, pidgin-English speaking natives harboring murderous intentions towards the white man.

Naturally, Sanders, Niven, Greene and Henry, being products of the British Empire, have no truck with such misguided prejudices and simply breeze through everything the locals can throw or fire at them while barely raising a sweat.  Their simplistic, faulty and primitive powers of detection and logic are blithely overlooked in the interests of moving them onward through one implausible scenario after another to the inevitable conclusion.
FOUR MEN AND A PRAYER is so bad it's enough to make one reassess Ford's standing as a legendary director. It doesn't do anything for the reputation of his cast either. Sanders gives no indication of the talent that was about to make him a star, Young is just embarrassing, Greene's shortcomings have already been discussed, and it's just bizarre watching Niven mugging away as the dimwitted comic relief. Who would have pegged him as a romantic leading man after a performance like that?   At least Smith had the good sense to die 15 minutes into the story and minimise his involvement with the whole misguided affair.
To put it kindly, the whole thing is a mess, a sloppy, contrived, cliched and disjointed mess completely lacking in the self-awareness to recognise its own awfulness.

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE: Oscar winning indie comedy brightened my day

A motivational speaker stands on a spot lit stage, presenting his 9-step “Refuse to Lose” program to an unseen audience in the darkness.

A little girl sits in the family room repeatedly watching and rewinding a videotape recording of the climax of a Miss America contest.

A teenage boy works out in his bedroom, lifting weights and doing press-ups. There’s a half opened parachute hanging from the ceiling. An enormous portrait of the philosopher Neitszche, painted onto a bedsheet, is pinned to one wall.

An old man snorts heroin off a small mirror in a locked bathroom.

A woman talks on a cell phone as she drives her car. She has a cigarette in one hand, and is telling the person the phone that “of course I’m not smoking!”

A suicidally depressed looking bearded man sits motionless in a wheelchair in a hospital room, attached to a drip, as the film’s title LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE appears on screen.

Welcome to the dysfunctional Hoover family of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Over the course of the next one hundred minutes we will become so attached to these characters that there will be a sense of genuine sadness when we are forced to say goodbye as the screen fades to black for the final time.

The motivational speaker is Richard Hoover, played by Greg Kinnear. Olive (Abigail Breslin) is his 7 year old daughter, sitting at home in front of the tv absolutely entranced by the emotional reaction of the contestant to being named Miss America. Her older brother Dwayne (Paul Dano) is pumping iron in his bedroom, getting himself fit for his dream future as an Air Force pilot.

It’s their grandpa, Richard’s dad, played by Alan Arkin, we see snorting drugs in the bathroom of their suburban home. Their mom, Sheryl (Toni Collette) is the woman in the car. She’s driving to the hospital to collect her brother Frank (Steve Carell).

As is revealed shortly afterwards in an embarrassingly inappropriate conversation at the family dinner table, Uncle Frank was in hospital because he’d tried to kill himself over an unrequited love affair with one of his adult male students.

This is not a group of people who should spend any length of time together in a confined space, but that is exactly what happens when Olive gets a last minute call-up to compete in the “Little Miss Sunshine” beauty pageant in Redondo Beach, California.

They all pile into their ancient bright yellow VW bus for the 800 mile road trip west. The two day journey swiftly turns into a survival test for the Hoovers as they’re forced to confront disappointment and death. Will the six of them manage to keep it together as a family or will the group implode under the pressure?

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE is a comedy about characters not action. The focus is on how they cope with each other rather than external events that happen to them as a group. Fans of “Lost in Translation,” “Garden State” and “Sideways” will love this family.

The film’s Oscar nomination for Best Picture Best Supporting Actress (Breslin) and wins for Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Arkin) are richly deserved. It’s a wonderful example of independent cinema’s ability to offer an accessible alternative to mainstream Hollywood’s staple diet of special effects laden blockbusters. Arkin is laugh-out-loud funny as the foul mouthed grandfather

who’s devoted to his granddaughter; while 10 year old Abigail Breslin’s adorable and totally natural performance forms the heart of the story.

These two were singled out by the Academy, but the whole cast is superb. They are totally convincing as real people we can identify with, rather than simply characters in a film. They bicker with each other, and they push against the constraints of the family unit while also recognising that they need each other.

The fact that LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE is the first feature film from husband and wife co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris makes their achievement all the more impressive. On one of the two director’s commentaries that accompany this DVD, they reveal it took them almost six years to get the project from the drawing board to the big screen. When they finally received the green light they were given just thirty days and a small budget to shoot it.

Funny, touching and – above all – believable, fans of all that is great about American independent cinema will want to make this film a permanent part of their DVD collection.