newcritics

…the best movie of the year.

The Oscar almost never goes to the best movie of the year.  The best movie of the year is rarely nominated, and that’s become even more the case over the last decade as more and more of the best picture nominees have been movies released in the late fall and early winter, their appearances at a theater near you timed by their studios to grab the attention of the Academy.

In other words, the best picture nominees are those movies the studios calculated were going to be Oscar-worthy, which are often movies that weren’t even completed when the decision on when to release them was made.  And we all know how good the studios are at calculating artistic worth.

This explains Babel, I think.

Oscar weekend continues here at newcritics, with posts by M.A. Peel writing about Peter O’Toole, Claire Helene reviewing the nominees for best live and animated short films, Stephen Manzi on the Oscar acceptance speech he never got to deliver and the screenplay he co-wrote that was the reason he didn’t get to deliver it, Tom Watson on the glamor and glory that was Hollywood, and me.

More fun to come today, finishing off tonight with a gala live-blogging of the Academy Awards hosted by Blue Girl.

What you’re not going to find here is my pick for Best Picture, although that was sort of my assignment.

Part of the reason I’m falling down on the job is that I haven’t seen Letters for Iwo Jima.  Just haven’t had the time to get to the movie theater and for some reason Clint Eastwood forgot to send me a screener.  And I suspect that it would have been my choice.

I have seen the other four nominees, and reviewed three of them, The Queen, The Departed, and now Little Miss Sunshine—that’s my latest post at newcritics.  I think of it as my other review of Little Miss Sunshine.  I plan to do a second review looking at a different aspect of the film at my place later.  My mini-review of Babel is a part of this very post and will appear right before your very eyes.

On paper, Babel looks like a Best Picture.  Great director, epic scope, big themes.  You can imagine the terrible beauty of the cinematography.  Sweeping vistas of the desert hills of Morocco, colorful but somber scenes in the streets of a Mexican village, dazzling night scenes of the Tokyo cityscape.

And it’s ambitious!  And brave!  Three quarters of the dialog isn’t even in English.  There’ll be subtitles.

And it’s one of those ensemble pieces, with all these apparently disconnected characters and storylines weaving in and out—just like Crash, and Crash won Best Picture last year…

On screen, Babel does look like a great and important movie.

It just doesn’t hold together like one.

Babel attempts to tell three parallel and intersecting stories (Fiction is free to flout geometry)—An American tourist and his wife are trapped in Morocco by a terrible accident, the couple’s housekeeper (played by Best Supporting Actress nominee Adrianna Barazza) back home in San Diego takes their children with her to her son’s wedding across the border and ends up getting them lost in an illegal immigrant’s nightmare, and a deaf Japanese high school girl, struggling and failing to come to terms with her mother’s suicide and her own blossoming womanhood, slowly comes apart at the seams.

If you can see the connection between that last one and the other two, you’ve seen more than the director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga managed to convey.  In the end, girl’s story is brought together with the others in a cursory and arbitrary way that highlights the other weakness of the movie’s three part structure.

Her story is the most dramatically, visually, and emotionally compelling.  It’s in fact a very good little movie unto itself.  Without having had to add much, Gonzalez Inarritu could have cut it out of the movie and released it as a separate picture, which might have had the added benefit of earning Rinko Kikuchi a nomination for Best Actress instead of the nomination for Best Supporting Actress, although she stands a better chance of winning that than she would have the other.  She’s my personal pick for Best Supporting Actress, at any rate.

Of the other two stories, the Housekeeper’s is more emotionally involving but it and the Moroccan sequences are thrown off balance by the casting of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as the American tourists.  Their parts are simply overweighted by their being movie stars.  Although both Pitt and Blanchett do fine jobs of playing their parts without a trace of movie star vanity—I think Pitt has always looked forward to the day when he’s gray and craggy, and that explains why he’s taken on so many roles, like this one, for which his pretty boy looks are irrelevent or something of a joke, and others, like his parts in Fight Club and Spy Games, that require his face to get messed up and stay messed up—-we expect too much of characters who look like them and invest too much in them.

As it turns out, Pitt and Blanchett’s characters are the least important of the leading roles, are in fact supporting roles, even in the Moroccan sequence, where the two boys who cause their accident are really the main characters.

Babel, I think, then, is a noble failure, and if I was a member of the Academy I’d have voted accordingly—for another picture.

Don’t make any bets on account of what I’m going to say.

Babel is the most Best Picture-like movie out of all the nominees, except for probably Letters From Iwo Jima, which I really wish I’d seen.  But because Eastwood already has two Best Picture Academy Awards, and because The Queen is a great character study but not all that exceptional a movie—it is an excellent piece of filmmaking, the way a bookshelf can be an excellent bit of carpentry but you wouldn’t compare it to a Hoosier cabinet—and because Little Miss Sunshine, the movie I most loved and enjoyed, is actually fairly slight, and because this is Marty’s year for Best Director, I expect The Departed to win Best Picture.

But, still, don’t be surprised, if the Academy looks at it, says, well, even so, it’s not his best work and take away the blood and the profanity and it’s kind of a run of the mill cops and robber picture and…the heck with it…there are no great movies up this year, let’s go with the movie Lance Mannion most loved and enjoyed just because it was lovable and enjoyable.