Infinite crisis (or, "Give me misery, or give me death")

Oscars weekend. Another opportunity for the Academy to vote for itself instead of voting for films.

If I sound a wee bit bitter on that point, it's because Maus and I watched Babel last night. Good movie, well written, well acted, beautifully shot — in nearly every way, a cut above anything else I saw this year. Except that it was just so miserable. God, I hope it doesn't win Best Picture. I'm still peeved about Crash.

I have nothing against difficult or troubling movies — on the contrary: pain, loss, and anguish are some of the most powerful themes a film can embrace. But there's a difference between watching people experience pain, and watching people cope with pain. It's a fine line, but it's a line that separates movies like Babel, Crash, and The Constant Gardner (all good movies that I did not particularly like) from movies like In the Bedroom, Monster, and Million Dollar Baby (which I felt were truly powerful).

Watching Babel, I tried to put my finger on just why this difference matters (to me, anyway). And here's more or less where I landed: Movies that torment their characters so that we can watch them suffer are really little more than sado-masochism masquerading as tragedy. These movies generally tend to spread the misery around, affecting as many characters as possible, and usually incorporate the classical motifs of tragedy: misfortune, fate, destiny, doom. But we tend to disconnect from these characters — we are watching pain and suffering as a situation, not as an experience.

That's precisely what Babel is like. We feel sympathy for the characters, we hope they'll pull through this, but it's the same kind of sympathy we feel when watching the evening news or reading the morning paper. It's disconnected.

Other films (the better films, in my opinion) focus on the characters and not on the situation, and use pain and suffering as means of tightening our connection with those characters. And when that happens, what we feel is empathy, not sympathy. Monster was a masterpiece in this regard, bringing us so close to a thoroughly unlikable character that we couldn't help but see just how human she was. And then we witness her evil acts, practically in the first-person, and we become involuntarily complicit in those horrors, because of our empathy for the character. That is powerful filmmaking.

The most prolifically successful director at conjuring up this kind of character engagement is Clint Eastwood. He first found it in Unforgiven, a remarkably even film which side-stepped the whole concept of “good guys” and “bad guys” and found a sympathetic moment for even its most brutal characters. He did the same thing in Mystic River. And then in Million Dollar Baby he placed us so squarely in the shoes of the lead character that we follow him, step-by-step, down the path that leads to the ruin of his soul. Like him, we desperately look for a fork in the road, any alternate path that will lead us away from that dreaded final decision. And his failure to find a way out feels like our failure as well.

I haven't seen Flags of our Fathers or Letters from Iwo Jima yet, but I have a hunch they're both better than Babel, which, for all its strengths, still came across as little more than an exercise in manipulation. It's a movie about perpetual crisis, and it doesn't really take much in the way of talent to just relentlessly punish your characters. (For “perpetual crisis” done well, see Open Water. Or No Man's Land. Or, for that matter, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.)

Ironically, Babel's strongest moments come right at the end, when the crisis is waning and the pressure's letting off and the characters are just beginning to cope with everything that's happened. Their lives have all been changed dramatically, but they haven't yet had a moment to digest it all. And just as that moment of realization — of reality — is settling in, the credits roll.

You know what might actually make a good movie? Babel 2.