(Cross posted in The Buddha Diaries)
About halfway through BABEL I wondered what I was doing there. By the time the film ended, I understood why I had stayed. It's a wrenching movie, with violence at its core. Knowing little about it before seeing it, I was ready for some harmless escapist fare.
What I got was something far more difficult. It's about human beings caught in the act of being human--in the most dire of all imaginable circumstances.
It's about bad things happening to good people, and about bad people's cold indifference to them. It's about the consequences of mindless action, about random acts of violence and calculated cruelty. It's about love and hatred, the results of fear and anger and mistrust, about guilt and innocence, official heartlessness and individual compassion.
It's about the agony of loss and grief, and the mad, occasional ecstasy of letting go all inhibitions. It's about the joys and fears around human sexuality, about defensiveness and vulnerability. It's about the difference between races, cultures, and religions--and about their interdependence. It's about the shared identity of the human species.
It's about being out on the edge and the fear of falling off it, about the brutal imminence and randomness of death in the midst of life. It's a film brimming with the everyday tragedy and folly of human existence--what Balzac called the "Comedie Humanine." It's about the way we butt up against each other in the strangest and most difficult of ways, how we stroke each other--and rub each other the wrong way.
It's also about language (the "babble" of human voices) and the ways in which we communicate with each other, about the limitations and the failures of communication that produce sometimes dreadful results.
"Babel"'s director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarrita, has done a powerful job in confronting us with the complexity, the contradictions, and the suffering of ordinary people in the world. He also celebrates the nobility and selflessness of which we are capable at times of stress. An outstanding movie.