I missed the very beginning and end of BABEL, but the film I saw made me wonder why it was made at all. Even foreign film fans will be hard-pressed to make sense of this one, or admire it for being a foreign film. Brad Pitt and wife Cate Blanchet go off on the road to Morocco, miss Bing and Bob by a hair, and she gets shot. Instead of putting her back on the tour bus they arrived in, Pitt awaits an ambulance that never comes. A helicopter finally arrives, but before then we get to watch Blanchet use a bedpan. In closeup. Back home, an illegal Mexican nanny takes Pitt's two children along with her to a relative's wedding in Mexico. On the return trip, she loses them in the desert for awhile. Over in Japan, an emotionally disturbed deaf girl who has witnessed -- or may have caused -- her mother's death gets naked in front of the cop interviewing her. I wish I could say she was the Japanese equivalent of Jennifer Love Hewitt, but no such luck. Her only connection to the plot is that her father, who apparently abuses her, sold his gun to the Moroccan who shot Blanchet. Watch MAGNOLIA instead.
Review of Babel
