“Babel”
Review: “Babelâ€
Artsy, with two alcoholism-related tangents
“Babel,”nominated for seven Academy Awards, is billed as a stylistic movie about connections and the difficulty of human communication. Indeed it is, but it’s also one that portrays tragedy occurring without alcoholism, while worsening with it and its close relation”childlike actions, by children and their counterpart, adults with adolescent mindsets resulting from alcoholism. It also includes a tangential story that might have been compelling in itself and should have been separately told.
The connections are part and parcel of chaos theory, which posits that small changes in initial physical conditions can escalate into major changes and that the more distant in time, the less predictable the outcomes. In life, too, seemingly insignificant events can result in dramatic and unpredictable changes. “Babel”chronicles a seemingly unimportant event that begins on the other side of the planet from which the tragic consequences play out.
Of interest to the addictionologist are Harry M. Tiebout’s observations from his extraordinary 1954 pamphlet, “The Ego Factors in Surrender in Alcoholism.”Tiebout points out that (1) the inflated ego of the alcoholic has its origins in Freud’s “His Majesty, the Baby;”(2) the little monarch tolerates frustration poorly; (3) such rulers have a tendency to do everything in a hurry; and (4) they have a sense of omnipotence, which I point out in How to Spot Hidden Alcoholics takes form in a Supreme Being complex and sense of invincibility. This feeling of godlikeness explains why both children and alcoholics fail to take into account the possible outcomes of misbehaviors and act without thinking. Shooting at a tourist bus is one such action, as is running from border police with a woman and two children in the car. Hence the tragedy, created by children in Morocco and worsened by an addict named Santiago, who drives his sister Amelia and her two wards back to the U.S. from a wedding party in Mexico, with Santiago uttering the classic line, “Drunk? My ass! I’m fine!â€
The movie is interesting, the cinematography excellent, but the story is not tied together the way it should have been. The sense that both my wife Marty and I had at the end was a sort of “clunk”and, “is that all?”The other story of addiction”the deaf Japanese girl’s (Chieko’s) mother’s suicide, resulting in some truly bizarre behaviors on the girl’s part”should be told as a separate story. We can at least explain the behaviors as one possible response of a child psychologically abandoned by her mother, likely an alcoholic since some 80% of suicides are rooted in alcoholism.
“Babel”deserves a review because you might otherwise be disappointed seeing a “just ok”movie billed as Academy Award material, a “masterfully interwoven story,”and a film that “explores the ways in which cultural assumptions and biases tend to obscure reality even when reality is plain, and the way our perceived differences keep us from finding a human connection to one another,”which is nonsensical to most viewers. It’s a two and one-half star movie (Marty would say less), interwoven in ways that make only partial sense, showing events connected by humans, some of whom are children and others childlike through biochemistry, which at least makes it more interesting than it would otherwise be.