So it’s true; Hollywood is a shallow, money-grubbing cesspool of executives, looking for the hottest item to fetch top dollar.
Actress Kikuchi Rinko adds a realness to “Babel” not reached by megastars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, playing a deaf-mute schoolgirl starved of human interaction.
Take “Babel,” for example, which could have been a riveting assay into the complex folds of human communication; instead, the film’s lopsided cast lacks any raw power, turning out a ballot-box stumper, drugged groggy with political buzz and muted commentary on today’s hot headlines.
Following “Amores Perros” and his hailed stint with Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro in “21 Grams,” Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, along with creative partner Guillermo Arriaga, returns to his directing niche: heavy plot, heavy drugs, heavy nudity and a whole heap of looming death. While “Babel” will inevitably draw comparisons to its predecessors’ spliced storylines, Inarritu’s latest has gone global — this time spanning four countries and languages.
In Mexico, a native nanny innocently tries to cross the border with two children while their parents (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) are scrambling to survive Blanchett’s freak gunshot wound in Morocco. There, police are hunting down the “terrorists” who fired the shot: a couple of unknowing boys playing with a gun. These two episodes alone carry the meatiest of the Nov. 7 slate: illegal immigration and American foreign policy. Inarritu’s critique of each makes for nice sound bites, but with an over-aged and exhaustingly familiar Pitt leading the cast, how meaningful can this commentary be?
Inarritu’s films, an outlandish tour of “What’s the Worst That Can Happen?” episodes, need a firm docket of actors to drive its extravagance. In “21 Grams,” Penn sold himself as a heart transplantee who rails his donor’s widow; Pitt lacks the balls to even kick a Brit’s ass for suggesting he ditch his dying wife. In “21 Grams,” Watts was incendiary as a substance-abusing widow who enlists her dead husband’s organ recipient to kill an ex-con; throughout the film, Blanchett is always bitter, moaning from pain or making out with Pitt while she’s peeing.
Yes, “Babel” is at times that absurd, and the Blanchett-Pitt combo is too weak to carry such excessiveness. But leading man and woman aside, there is salvation.
The film’s third storyline features a deaf Japanese girl grappling with her disability in the tough face of J-pop teen life. The constant voyeurism and pube shots accompanying her story again edge on brazen, but the gravity of the character’s handicap — physically creating the woman-without-a-voice motif — makes this plot string oddly endearing. Gael Garcia Bernal’s drunken goofery and scene-stealing lines give the immigration issue a tender, human side. But again, the commentary on today’s news — this time the inhumanity of border relations — becomes overt, especially with an overacting Clifton Collins Jr., who is apparently still sad he starred with Cuba Gooding Jr. in the face-flop “Dirty.”
Inarittu’s newcomers to acting are, ironically, the big-name film’s redemption. And in a decade when the CNN prattle is human cloning, flying cars and the gender of Lindsay Lohan’s sixth baby, “Babel” will lose its hollow timeliness and display its solid core: a rare, harsh and thrilling interplay of culture, society and language.
