Babel Review: Life Needs Translation

The biblical story of Babel takes up a handful of verses in the 11th chapter of Genesis, and it illustrates, among other things, the terrible consequences of unchecked ambition. As punishment for trying to build a tower that would reach the heavens, the human race was scattered over the face of the earth in a state of confusion — divided, dislocated and unable to communicate. More or less as we find ourselves today.

It tells four distinct stories, disclosing bit by bit the chronology and causality that link them and making much of the linguistic, cultural and geographical distances among the characters. The movie travels — often by means of jarringly abrupt cuts and shifts of tone — from the barren mountains of Morocco, where the dominant sound is howling wind, to fluorescent Tokyo, where the natural world has been almost entirely supplanted by a technological environment, to the anxious border between the United States and Mexico. Each place has its own aural and visual palette. The languages used by the astonishingly diverse cast include Spanish, Berber, Japanese, sign language and English. The misunderstandings multiply accordingly, though they tend to be most acute between husbands and wives or parents and children, rather than between strangers.
　　
But let’s give feeling its due. The sheer reckless ardor of Mr. González Iñárritu’s filmmaking — the voracious close-ups, the sweeping landscape shots, the swiveling, hurtling camera movements — suggests a virtually limitless confidence in the power of the medium to make connections out of apparent discontinuities. His faith in cinema as a universal language could hardly be more evident.
　　
Some of the pieces of “Babel” are attached to one another by the banal lingua franca of television images, as events in North Africa, for instance, make the evening news in Tokyo. But Mr. González Iñárritu’s own visual grammar tries to go deeper, to suggest a common idiom of emotion present in certain immediately recognizable gestures and expressions. We may not be able to read minds or decipher words, he suggests, but we can surely decode faces, especially when we see them at close range and in distress. Loss, fear, pain, anguish — none of these emotions, it seems, are likely to be lost in translation.
　　
The most glamorous cast members are Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, who play an American couple on a desultory vacation in Morocco, trying to repair the damage done to their marriage by the death of their infant son. Their movie-star charisma is turned down to a low, flickering flame, and the easy sense of entitlement they sometimes betray belongs naturally to their characters, Susan and Richard, who nonetheless receive a brutal reminder that even the privileged are vulnerable to accident.
　　
Susan — the kind of tourist who worries that the local ice cubes carry disease — is badly wounded when a bullet is fired through a bus window, hitting her in the neck. The bullet comes from a gun belonging to Abdullah (Mustapha Rachidi), a goatherd, and used by his two sons, Ahmed (Said Tarchani) and Yussef (Boubker Ait El Caid), to keep jackals away from the herd.
　　
The gunmen and their victim are never in the frame together, and the consequences of the incident unfold in parallel crises. Susan and Richard wind up in a small town, waiting for an ambulance, facing the panic and impatience of their fellow holiday makers and relying on the kindness of strangers. Abdullah and his sons and neighbors, for their part, must deal with the harsh attentions of the Moroccan police, who are trying to defuse what threatens to become an international incident.


Babel suggests something coming out of the ether—always in a hurry but sometimes dropping clues as to where it's going and where it will end up. Chronology is jumbled as it was in 21 Grams, only this film's fudging of time is slightly less shrill, sometimes even soothing (a phone call received by one of the characters indicates that someone else—far away and close to death—might just turn out okay). In the end, though, it's not the linking devices, however desperate, that cripple the film (and the audience), but the stories themselves, which are jerry-rigged with the sort of scare tactics that tritely invite the cluck of one's tongue. In Mexico, Amelia's nephew Santiago (Gael García Bernal) shoots a bullet into the air (at which point you wonder if it will ricochet off a taco stand and go through someone's head), but not before he decapitates a chicken, scaring the shit out of Susan and Bill's lily-white son Mike (Nathan Gamble). The film delights in keeping its audience on edge, evoking life as a perpetual roller coaster ride of potential doom and gloom.

　　
In “Babel” there seems to be an active, palpable tension between the schematism of Mr. Arriaga’s scenario and the sensuality of Mr. González Iñárritu’s filmmaking. Some of the most exciting and powerful sequences — a Tokyo nightclub rave, the wedding of Amelia’s son — push beyond the constraints of the narrative and defy, at least for a time, the grim inevitability that hovers over the film.
　　
The sheer sensory exuberance of the film at once subverts the fatalism of its story and lends it whatever credibility it has. On paper, very little of it makes sense, but what is on screen has an almost physical impact. In the end “Babel,” like that tower in the book of Genesis, is a grand wreck, an incomplete monument to its own limitless ambition. But it isthere, on the landscape, a startling and imposing reality. It’s a folly, and also, perversely, a wonder.

Facing Bela Tarr’s Final Film, ‘The Turin Horse’

Based on a scenario by longtime Tarr collaborator Laszlo Krasznahorkai,The Turin Horse begins by recounting an anecdote to explain its title: While walking in Turin in 1889, Nietzsche saw a cab driver thrashing his horse, and threw himself between the animal and the whip. The philosopher then collapsed and spent the rest of his life in quiet dementia, mostly in the care of his mother and sister.

The plot, such as it is, simply depicts six days in the life of the man – elderly, with one useless arm and, perhaps, one blind eye – and the grown daughter with whom he shares the cottage. They get up, get dressed, get water from the well, try to go to work – though the horse, ailing and refusing to eat, and an ever more violent gale prevent their doing so – eat (boiled potatoes only, using their fingers), stare out at the storm, and sleep. One day, a man visits to borrow brandy and speaks of the desolate prospects facing greedy, self-serving humanity; another day, a passing band of gypsies comes to the well but is driven away by the irate cottage-owner, leaving a religious tome for his daughter as recompense. That’s it, in terms of story – except that by the fifth day it feels as if the wind will never drop and the wretched pair will never be able to leave their home.

All this – which lasts two and half hours – is conveyed by around 30 long, elegant shots, beautifully lit and composed in monochrome by frequent Tarr collaborator Fred Kelemen; other regulars on board for what he has described as his last film include co-writer László Krasznahorkai (on whose novel Tarr’s masterpiece ‘Sátántangó’ was based), composer Mihály Vig (here contributing a dirge-like minimalist drone that matches the repetitively rhythmic raging of the tempest), and editor/co-director Ágnes Hranitsky. The slow pace, the generally miserabilist mood, the sparse dialogue and the focus on mundane quotidian domestic ritual will not be to everyone’s taste, and at times the sheer single-mindedness of the film threatens to slide into something like self-parody. Yet somehow it weaves its hypnotic spell: so bold are both the conception and execution of Tarr’s darkly cinematic elegy that the final scenes are as sobering as anything in his – or indeed anyone else’s – body of work.

Aside from a strong and increasing wind, The Turin Horse could be set in the same empty spot asWaiting for Godot. Like Beckett's play, Tarr's film is about the daily lives of two isolated people, occasionally interrupted by visitors. One difference is that, where Beckett's characters are locked in their routines, Ohlsdorfer (Janos Derzsi) and his unnamed heir (Erika Bok) are being blown out of theirs. The duo's harsh world is getting harsher.

It's not just the wind, underlined by Mihaly Vig's minimalist score. The horse is acting strange, and the well is going dry. At times, it even seems that the sun has gone out. As in Tarr's more elaborately plotted 2000 masterpiece, Werckmeister Harmonies, a great disaster looms off-screen.

The two peasants' visitors bring alarming messages, though they're vague. An acquaintance arrives to buy some liquor, and warns that greedy humanity is doomed. Later, some gypsies pass though, and the man drives them off, although perhaps too late. They give the granddaughter a book that Tarr has described as a Nietzschean "anti-Bible."

The bleakness is unrelenting — yet that's probably not why The Turin Horse has prompted so many audience walkouts. The film is structured as the events of six days, and each chapter promises to repeat the same obsessive depiction of simple acts: fetching water, chopping wood, eating potatoes and helping Ohlsdorfer, who has a lame arm, get dressed and undressed. The movie oppresses less through gloom than with repetition.

And yet there's enormous variation within the tight confines of this parable, in large part because of the compositions and cinematography. Tarr and his veteran cameraman, Fred Kelemen, employ long hand-held camera takes. (There are only about 30, averaging roughly eight minutes each.) The film was shot in and around a farmhouse, built for the production, that is essentially one large room and an attached stable. The way the characters (including the horse) move through this space creates a sense of intimacy and completeness.

As for the horse - which figures less than expected - it is mostly a solemn, impassive background presence, and a focus for the enigmatic drift of the film. Is the horse a repository, like Bresson’s donkey Baltasar, of human suffering? Or does it embody the universe’s absolute implacable indifference to humanity? The Nietzsche prologue, seemingly tangential to the main action, enigmatically bolsters the effect of parable.

Tarr has announced that this will be his last film, and indeed it’s hard to imagine where he could go from here. It’s a shame to think of this heroically uncompromising director shutting up shop, but if he does, The Turin Horse is a magnificent farewell - although the film ought perhaps to be accompanied by a warning for the depressive.

"The Debt" Offers Up More Bang Than Brains

At first glance, The Debt might look like a run of the mill espionage drama – with plenty of big name stars putting on Israeli and German accents to sell a narrative about a group of secret agents thirty years after the events that made them national icons. In fact, the mere presence of go-to action guy Sam Worthington would seem to indicate that The Debt offers up more bang than brains.

In the hands of many other directors, The Debt - which is a remake of an Israeli film of the same name (from Assaf Bernstein) – could have easily gone the route of similar espionage movies. However, John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) is ultimately much less concerned with the tense spy-mission set-up, and instead spends the majority of the film playing out a tense character drama. But does the substance over style approach deliver an entertaining and memorable time at the movies?

Fortunately, the answer is yes. Not only does Madden succeed in committing an interesting character drama to film, the director also finds a compelling way to pull tension out of even the most uneventful moments in the script. As a result, in a time when so many films set-aside story and character in favor of CGI and big explosions, it’s an especially commendable accomplishment when a director can engage an audience with nothing more than the basics of artistic expression – solid performances and captivating (as well as real) characters, all grounded in an intriguing narrative journey.

For anyone unfamiliar with The Debt, the basic plot follows three Mossad agents who engaged in a top secret mission to abduct German war criminal Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen), in order to bring him to Israel for public trial. The plot jumps back and forth 30 years between the 1967 mission and the 1997 aftermath of the event, where new information regarding the mission comes to light, forcing the agents – Rachel (Helen Mirren/Jessica Chastain), Stephan (Tom Wilkinson/Marton Csokas), and David (Ciaran Hinds/Sam Worthington) - back into each other’s lives to make sense of their time in East Berlin – as well as what the revelation could mean for their respective futures.

The overarching story is one of the stronger elements of the movie (despite a few overly-sentimental moments) and successfully manages to carry the characters from the interesting period piece drama to the aftermath and subsequent reflection. The portion of the story that takes place in 1967 East Berlin is tense, and even without the modern narrative arc, the story of the Mossad operatives’ mission would be exciting and interesting on its own. However, the modern scenes add a delicious layer of depth and complexity, grounded in hind-sight regret and reflection, that bring everyone full-circle, even after 30 years.

That said, the narrative would be nothing without the bevy of captivating performances in the film. Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, and Ciaran Hinds all live-up to their usual acclaim – successfully depicting a fractured group of individuals that have been weighed-down by their shared experience and no longer know how to relate to (much less care for) one another after many years. However, the most captivating moments of the film belong to their younger counterparts, Jessica Chastain, Marton Csokas, and Sam Worthington, respectively. This is hardly a knock against the older generation, but as mentioned, the 1967 time period storyline offers a number of chilling and complicated character moments that are delivered with powerful subtlety.

A lot is required of Chastain in particular, who not only has difficult moments with both members of her team, but shares a lot of tense screen time with the film’s “villain,” Dieter Vogel. Jesper Christensen is excellent as Vogel, capturing the genuine complexity of a Nazi “monster” living a normal life in post-World War II Germany. In one breath, Christensen can seamlessly transition from hateful anti-Semitic rhetoric to a concerned and almost relatable everyman.

It’s also worth noting that Sam Worthington, who is often (and for good reason) criticized for wooden action roles, offers a very subtle but competent performance as the younger David. Despite the presence of his usual head-down intensity, the actor manages to communicate a lot of layers in The Debt - often without having to even say a word.

Despite The Debt’s complexity – which deals with very real situations and truths – a few of the overarching story beats are overtly mechanical, serving to somewhat force-fuel a few end results and play against how certain characters might actually have handled a given situation. As a result, there are a few scenes that are hard to accept, given the fact that we’re talking about Mossad operatives. The story attempts to remedy these challenging suspensions of disbelief by hinging heavily on the assertion that we’re all human – no matter how monstrous or highly trained – and, while that idea certainly makes the characters real people – it doesn’t always rectify their less believable actions.

In the end, there are a couple of intended surprises and shocks that most movie regulars will probably see coming – though, ultimately, the lack of surprise doesn’t detract from how these moments affect the characters, as well as play to the overarching story. That said, aside from these few predictable (or mechanical) story beats, it’s hard not to enjoy (and think about) The Debt. It may not be the movie marketed in the trailers, but in this case, that’s actually a compliment.

"Contagion" Has Plenty Of Insight Into That World

Steven Soderbergh started off the new millennium with the Oscar-winning film Traffic, a broad and sweeping look at the so-called “war on drugs,” told through the interconnected stories of an ensemble cast of characters. With his latest film, Contagion, Soderbergh applies his Traffic formula to the battle against a deadly pandemic that is loosed upon mankind.

However, where Traffic provided a fresh (and necessary) bigger picture look at a subject many had a narrow view of, Contagion faces the challenge of having to distinguish itself from an overcrowded lane of similar movies that have already dealt with the threat, and resounding effects, of mass epidemic.

So, does Soderbergh – along with his cast of well-regarded actors – manage to rise to the challenge of turning something so familiar into something fresh and interesting? In terms of technique and style, the answer is yes; however, in terms of heart and emotion, Contagion is not as potent as one might hope.

The film plays like a connect-the-dots game of viral infection. The outbreak begins with some ill-fated world travelers, including Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), a businesswoman who returns home to Midwest America and spreads the deadly disease to the local population. What ensues thereafter is a literal connect-the-dots game, as The World Health Organization and Center for Disease Control send their best scientific minds (Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard and Jennifer Ehle) to track the disease back to its origin, contain its spread, and develop a vaccine. But this new force of nature isn’t the only problem the doctors must contend with: there are still plenty forces of man – panic, politics – that are just as dangerous as the virus itself.

Contagion is yet another good example of Soderbergh’s capacity to fit a lot of smaller puzzle pieces together into a distinct bigger picture. Terms like “The War on Drugs” or “Race For a Cure” are worn-out slogans in our day and age, but truly cataloging all of the lives and experiences encompassed in those slogans is a challenging task for anyone’s imagination. To his credit, Soderbergh explores the spread and effect of disease in a way that is certainly interesting and stylish – but also cold, calculating, and numbingly clinical.

A virus has no emotion. It infects, replicates, kills, mutates, and continues to infect without discrimination or prejudice. Despite the swollen cast of characters populating Scott Z. Burns’ (The Bourne Ultimatum) script, on a tonal level, Contagion imitates the virus that drives its plot forward. The film moves from character to character, dispatching certain people with cruel efficiency before moving on to new “hosts” for the story to follow. The characters combating the deadly virus (the aforementioned doctors) are scientific minds trained to be as unflinching and efficient as their viral opponent, and so the actors playing them are cold and clinical, even in the face of potential Armageddon. It’s all interesting on an intellectual level, but hard to connect to any particular character on an emotional level.

Even characters who are given more dramatic arcs – Matt Damon as a traumatized overbearing father, or Jude Law as a controversial Internet blogger – are portrayed with stunted emotion and/or calculating logic. Every character choice and motivation seems mechanically formulaic (If “A” occurs, proceed to do “B”), and for a film that totes the tagline “Nothing Spreads Like Fear,” Contagion is quite sterile (from its tone to its crisp digital shots) and fails to capture the sheer emotion of such a terrible situation. There are some chilling and/or heartfelt moments that occur here and there, but these are ultimately fleeting, as Soderbergh and Burns are clearly more concerned with mapping out their larger blueprint.

The most stirring trick the movie employs is actually a stylistic one: time and again we get “virus POV” shots of random objects (glasses, door handles, subway poles, etc.) which detail – in truly unnerving fashion – just how vulnerable we are to infection in our everday lives. This “virus POV” effect is cool, stirring, and will definitely leave you feeling slightly more germaphobic than when you entered the theater (or even about being in a movie theater - how meta!); it also serves the purpose of being the through-line by which all the dots are connected, as the virus is ultimately traced back to its tragic (and preventable) origins. For those who are good at connect-the-dots games: Contagion contains a distinct messages in its chronicling of how this virus came to be, and how small and connected the world truly is. These will likely be divisive messages for some, given the world we live in today, so keep your eyes on how all the pieces fit together, and what the big picture is actually depicting.

In the end, Contagion is like spending a Saturday morning in biology class: sure, you’ll learn a worthwhile or interesting thing or two, but you’ll also wish you were doing something much more fun with your time. For those curious about the biological precipice upon which our species exists, and those who work tirelessly to keep us from falling over it – this film has plenty of insight into that world. For those hoping to see a more traditional dramatic thriller: this film won’t be the cure you’re looking for.

"Paranormal Activity 3" To Be Scarier, Funnier And More Entertaining

It’s hard to imagine that it’s only been two years since our own Kofi Outlaw was among the first film reviewers to screen the original Paranormal Activity – back when the film was only in limited release. At the time, it was unclear whether the found-footage horror flick (which was actually shown in 2007 at the Screamfest Film Festival) would ever see a full-scale release. However, fueled by fan “demand” (literally) the original Paranormal Activity haunted the box office to the tune of $107 million domestically – on a production budget of just $15,000. As a result, it was no surprise when the sequel, Paranormal Activity 2 scored an astounding $41 million in its opening weekend.

Now, the franchise is back once again with Paranormal Activity 3 – a prequel that fleshes out the story of sisters, Katie and Kristi, who are tormented by an other-worldly presence. This time, however, the movie’s producers recruited a fresh filmmaking duo, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, to handle directorial duties. The pair rocketed to fame after critics, moviegoers, and even network news outlets debated the validity of their 2009 documentary Catfish. Do the sophomore feature filmmakers continue Paranormal Activity‘s successful run or has the found footage series run out of scares?

Fortunately the directors have a batch of new tricks at their disposal (as a result of the 80s timeframe) – as wedding videographer and man of the house, Dennis (Christopher Nicholas Smith) comes up with inventive ways to capture the bizarre events occurring in the family’s house. A panning VHS camera (attached to the base of an oscillating fan) offers some of the film’s most tense moments – and definitely improves upon the often static images of the prior installments in the series. The retro backdrop also provides a number of cathartic, and unintentional, laughs – such as the appearance of a fancy “cordless phone.”

The filmmakers have, over the course of the prior movies, managed to deliver a relatively intriguing over-arching mythology – one that is further developed in the third installment. Obviously, as with all these movies, the story isn’t the central focus but it’s good to see the producers and writers at least attempting to weave a somewhat coherent through-line.

While the adult versions of Katie and Kristi (played by Katie Featherston and Sprague Grayden, respectively) are present in the film, the Paranormal Activity 3 story (as mentioned) is actually a prequel to both the 2009 and 2010 plot lines. Instead of forwarding the narrative beyond the events of the prior films, the third installment focuses on Katie and Kristi as children (played by Chloe Csengery and Jessica Tyler Brown, respectively) - when they first encounter the paranormal presence that later defines and terrorizes their adult lives. As with the last version, this film isn’t likely to address many of the questions left in the wake of Paranormal Activity but it still manages to deliver a compelling addition to the series mythology.

Anyone expecting a change to the franchise formula (such as the often maligned jump from The Blair Witch Project to Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2) or a significant up to the Paranormal Activity 2 ante, may find the storytelling, scares, and visuals of Paranormal Activity 3 to be mostly “more of the same.” The third film definitely features a few moments that could be considered “larger” in scale than prior films; however, the majority of the runtime is still a waiting game that could be underwhelming for certain filmgoers. In general, anyone who has tired of the series’ formula won’t find a fresh variety of scares in the third installment – but that doesn’t mean that the film isn’t a worthy follow-up for moviegoers who still crave the subtle and creepy anticipation that dominates this series format.

As mentioned, 1988 Dennis has far fewer resources than 2006 Daniel Rey (the father in the second installment) – as a result, instead of a high-tech multi-camera montage, the Paranormal Activity 3 set-up is limited to two static shots as well as the aforementioned panning camera. The limitation actually forces the filmmakers to be much more creative, and showcase a lot of variety in what is actually shown in each of the three rooms – instead of relying on a lot of different rooms. The result is a much more “in-your-face” experience – as the cameras are situated lower to the ground (not mounted high above the action) – and audiences will become intimately familiar with what should (and shouldn’t) be happening in each room.

Also, unlike the prior installments (which featured adequate but mostly stilted acting), Paranormal Activity 3 has a solid cast of performers that manage to make good on the scares – as well as inject believable humor into the mix. It’s only fair to point out that this round of actors, specifically the adults, already have significant filmographies behind them – as the producers are no longer concerned with casting unknowns to maintain the impression any of the footage might actually be real.

That said, obviously these aren’t Oscar-worthy performances, but all five of the “main” characters – Katie, Krysti, and Dennis as well as mother, Julie (Lauren Bittner), and family friend, Randy (Dustin Ingram) – deliver surprisingly likable performances in their respective roles. The adults inject plenty of humor and intriguing overarching exposition and the young girls successfully carry the creepier moments of the movie – since they’re often the ones being terrorized by the paranormal “activity.” As a result, compared to prior installments, the world created in these 80s VHS tapes is much more fleshed out and authentic – with real people, not just caricatures and demon fodder, reacting to the increasingly dangerous series of events playing out on screen.

Paranormal Activity 3 doesn’t reinvent the series’ wheel but it definitely refines an already effective format (and ups the ante by adding a few spikes to the rubber). While it’s still unclear where the franchise will go from this point forward, for the time being, the third film will no doubt deliver on (and possibly exceed) expectations. Non-fans of the series won’t find any marked changes to rekindle their interest but anyone who enjoyed either Paranormal Activity or Paranormal Activity 2 will probably consider this film to be scarier, funnier, and ultimately more entertaining than its predecessors.