Human interconnectivity is a legitimate theme explored with subtlety, wit, and genuine insight by thoughtful directors such as Krzysztof Kieslowski (The Double Life of Veronique, Trois Couleurs) and Stephen Gaghan (Syriana). Unfortunately, this theme is also the driving factor of pandering, clichéd groan-inducers such as Traffic, Crash, and Babel. (I know that Gaghan also wrote Traffic, but Traffic is not as good as Syriana.) Movies like Traffic, Crash, and Babel are content with declaring that we are all related to each other somehow, and that’s really all that they have to say about life. On the other hand, movies like The Double Life of Veronique, Trois Couleurs, and Syriana take note of human interconnectivity and move on to other serious matters.

Movies like Traffic, Crash, and Babel (ab)use weighty topics and turn them into bad jokes. Oh, look, the drug czar’s daughter sells her body for drugs. Oh, look, the possibly racist white cop saves a black woman. Oh, look, a deaf girl is so alienated from the world that she forces her dentist and a policeman to touch her breasts and crotch. Just because a writer puts his characters through a lot of pain and grief doesn’t mean that a movie is automatically “dramatic” or “important”. Traffic, Crash, and Babel are what I would call “emotional porn”. Oh, look how mightily they’re suffering! All those tears are never-ending money shots.

It is especially galling to see a “high-minded” movie like Babel resort to sexist stereotypes about Japanese schoolgirls. Japanese schoolgirls don’t wear skirts as short as the ones on display in this movie. Plus, is it really necessary to have Rinko Kikuchi standing naked on a high-rise balcony after already showing that her character feels cold standing naked indoors? Yes, I don’t know Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu personally, but it seems like the director is as much a product of Latin America’s male-oriented machismo culture as the next Hispanic guy.

Other problems abound. Babel is one of those misguided “tourist” movies that tries to pretend otherwise. It is painfully apparent that Gonzalez does not even have an incipient understanding of Japan, Japanese culture, and Japanese people, but he tries to make it seem like his movie is “authentic”. This is in contrast to the approach that Sofia Coppola took with Lost in Translation; Coppola made the movie from the perspective of an outsider, which she is, instead of pretending that she knew exactly what it was that makes the Japanese tick.

Like Traffic, Babel has nothing substantive to say about social issues. Other than indicating that border controls and illegal immigration are problems without easy solutions, all Gonzalez really does is try to make everyone feel bad about the way that Mexicans are treated by American authorities and the law. While building a wall and having vigilantes hunt down illegal crossers are bad ideas, it is actually sensible and not “wrong” for a country to try to safeguard its boundary lines.

As my friend and fellow DVD reviewer John J. Puccio wrote, the real theme of Babel is dumbness. Only dumb kids would fire a gun at a bus for no reason. Only dumb parents would go to an economically-depressed and socially-repressed country like Morocco to try to feel better about losing a child. Only dumb nannies would try to take other peoples’ kids on cross-border trips. Only dumb girls would make crude sexual advances at inopportune times.

There is nothing wrong with making a movie about human interconnectivity. However, the approach taken by movies like Traffic, Crash, and Babel is, as according to my good friend John J. Puccio, dumbness.

David McCoy