Towering Inferno

Since many people in and around the motion-picture industry have an unfortunate tendency to mistake gloom for profundity, these depressing wallows often attract popular and admired performers who are willing and eager to take relatively small parts in which they can emote a lot. At film festivals, bouquets are tossed. Critics sing hosanna. And eventually, award nominations droppeth like the gentle rain from heaven on the depressing place beneath.

Advertising copywriters in decades past used to call fare like Rocky or Chariots of Fire “the feel good movie of the year.” These films should compete for the title of Feel Bad Movie of the Year. In 2002, the Feel Bad Movie was The Hours, in which Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for playing the suicidal Virginia Woolf while Ed Harris was nominated for an Oscar playing a guy with AIDS who jumps out a window. The Hours was nominated as well, but failed to win Best Picture (in my view) because most of the audience spent the last hour of the movie looking for a window to jump out of. Fortunately or unfortunately, there are no windows in movie theaters.

The Feel Bad Movie of the Year in 2005 actually managed to win the Oscar for Best Picture. In Crash, nine people living in Los Angeles reveal just how tragically divided we are by race and gender and class and age and sexual orientation and make of vehicle. Many people were surprised that Crash took the big prize instead of the gay tragedy Brokeback Mountain. But Brokeback was also a Feel Bad Movie, and it just couldn’t compete with Crash in that department. Depressing as Brokeback was, it just didn’t quite make you feel as rotten as Crash did, nor did it feature a scene like the one in Crash, in which you learn that the back of a van you thought was full of drugs is actually full of sobbing Laotians, chained together at the heel, being kept as slaves.

The Feel Bad Movie of 2003 was 21 Grams, which seemed to have everything going for it beginning with the title–which supposedly indicates the amount of weight a human body loses at the moment of death. Naomi Watts plays a woman whose husband and kids have been killed by a drunk driver. Sean Penn receives the husband’s heart in a transplant operation. He and Watts have an affair that is primarily remarkable for its joylessness. Watts wants Penn to kill the drunk driver; Penn ends up killing himself. Somehow, the Academy overlooked this one in the Best Picture race, but it did nominate Naomi Watts, who limned the movie’s most depressing character by far. 21 Grams was the first film in English by a Mexican team: Director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga. They came to prominence in international movie circles with Amores Perros in 2000, a delightful confection in which a beautiful model becomes a cripple and loses her dog under the floorboards of her house while a man sleeps with his brother’s wife and forces his dog to fight to its death. Amores Perros (translation: “Love’s a Bitch”) kicked off the team’s career in the Feel Bad genre.

This year, they have achieved a career landmark with their third film together. It’s called Babel, and González Iñárritu and Arriaga have had a major falling-out over who deserves the greater share of credit for their collaboration. It’s understandable that two men would come to blows over Babel, and not just because it won prizes at the Cannes Film Festival and is the focus of intense Oscar talk. Babel, you see, isn’t just the Feel Bad Movie of the Year. It may be the Feel Bad Movie of All Time. Forget waterboarding, Andrew Sullivan. If they showed this movie to al Qaeda detainees in secret prisons, the torture they would undergo would certainly violate the Geneva Convention. Nobody, and I mean nobody, deserves to feel as lousy as Babel makes you feel.

Like the other González Iñárritu /Arriaga collaborations, this one scrambles up its plotlines and its timeline. But basically, here’s the story. There’s this deaf-mute 15-year-old Japanese girl who watched her mother commit suicide in their Tokyo apartment. The girl’s father takes a hunting trip to Morocco and gives his gun to his Moroccan guide. The Moroccan guide sells the gun to a family of goat herders. The family’s two young sons test the range of the rifle by firing at a moving bus far away. A bullet from the gun hits Cate Blanchett, who plays a San Diego matron on vacation in Morocco after her youngest child died of sudden infant death syndrome. Her surviving children have been left in the care of a Mexican nanny. The nanny takes the kids to Mexico to her son’s wedding, and on the way back to San Diego, they end up (don’t ask how) wandering in the desert near the U.S.-Mexican border, parched with thirst and miles from help.

Meanwhile, Blanchett is dying in a remote Moroccan village while her husband, Brad Pitt, tries to find someone who can help. At the same time, back in Tokyo, the deaf-mute Japanese girl is wandering around her apartment’s balcony, thinking about jumping off, even as Moroccan cops start firing at the goat-herding kids.

The movie’s title apparently refers to the Tower of Babel, and González Iñárritu and Arriaga set it up so that everything in the movie is the result of miscommunication and misunderstanding. There’s something interesting about that, but then you begin to notice that no matter the language barrier, everybody actually understands each other perfectly, so it’s hard to figure out what the big deal is.

Basically, González Iñárritu and Arriaga have one message for us: No matter where you are, in the Far East or North Africa or La Jolla, life is one giant hell and you could die at any moment. Particularly if you’re a child.

It’s the use of children and teenagers–whom we see fearful, wracked with physical and emotional pain, shot, in danger of death by exposure, and under fire–that makes Babel not merely depressing but contemptible. It’s the cheapest stunt in the world to evoke raw emotion from an audience by placing a child in jeopardy. González Iñárritu and Arriaga place no fewer than five children in danger in this movie, and kill off a newborn baby for good measure. It almost seems like a sick joke when the movie ends with a dedication to the director’s two kids.

Yes, Babel is the Feel Bad Movie of the Millennium. It’s also bad, plain and simple, no matter how many prizes it wins or how many people are tricked by its sober and solemn tone into imagining that it has anything to say about the human condition. Except, of course, that the big fight between the director and the screenwriter over who deserves the credit for Babel tells us a great deal about the filmmakers themselves–about how the film’s fatuous message of the need for universal brotherhood is easily drowned out by their desperate hunger for critical attention.

John Podhoretz is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘S movie critic.