Amores Perros

This year at Cannes, for the first time ever, director Alejandro González Iñárritu is going to debut a movie not written by Guillermo Arriaga. I'm excited, because Inarritu is a top flight filmmaker who really needs to get someone else writing screenplays for him. Not that I hate Arriaga, but he's kind of a one trick pony, as evidenced by their first collaboration, Amores Perros.

So, as you should already know, it's a film about several characters tied together by one central event. In this case, a big, really nicely executed car crash that opens the film. It's caused by dog fighter/douchebag Octavio (Gael Garcia Bernal) who did some stupid things while trying to get money to run away with his abusive douchebag brother's wife (Marco Perez as the brother, Vanessa Bauche as the wife). He runs into successful model and owner of an astonishingly stupid dog Valeria (Goya Toledo) who has really shrill arguments with her man Daniel (Álvaro Guerrero), who just separated from his wife so they could live together in an apartment with a hole in the floor and an amazing view of the successful model's legs. Saving the best for last, there is also the Hobo Assassin (Emilio Echevarría), who goes around being awesome with his pack of wild dogs and his regrets.

So, we have three stories crammed together into one film, all about how love screws you in some way (a translation of the title is Love's a Bitch). While it's the beginning of the collaboration, having seen this film last of the three that director and writer collaborated on, it's familiar ground that they will pretty much draw all life out of following this. While it's handled in a relatively clever way in 21 Grams, and there is a lot more of it in Babel, between the three films they have done pretty much everything possible with the structure.

The question with this is, does this need the structure at all? Two of the three stories could do perfectly fine as a stand alone feature. The douchbag dogfighter chapter needs a bit of fleshing out post-accident and it's will do fine. It feels more familiar than the other two, but it would certainly work well as a film of its own. It's got an interesting perspective on a battered wife that doesn't really get explored enough - why is she so loyal, for instance?

The best chapter, however, is that of the Hobo Assassin. Never mind how cool he is - there's a scene where he goes over a hill with obligatory ass-kicking music and his hobo cart and feral dogs, it subverts cool action hero cliches and is completely awesome in its own right. Where was I? Oh right, it doesn't matter that he's just cool, he's got a compelling story, the arc of his assassination attempts on a rich guy with greasy hair is compelling and there's a bit more that can be done with the characters involved in the assassination plot. He is, on his own, much more interesting and compelling than every other character in the story, and really deserves a complete two hours rather than having to compete with two other stories.

So, why doesn't the accident victim deserve an entire film devoted to her? Well, it's a big dead weight in the middle of the film. For some reason, Arriaga writes people who have recently been in debilitating and life ruining accidents as shrill, screaming morons without common sense. This was especially apparent in Babel, but it's pretty bad here, as the character of Valeria - who should be at least a little sympathetic - wears out her welcome early and then wastes away any remaining good will by just being annoying, until being annoying and jealous. Her boyfriend bitch slapped by the screenplay, as it seems to suggest that he got what he deserved for leaving his perfect in every way wife, who is on screen for so little we don't understand why he left her. They're not very interesting characters, and then they make themselves hateful, Valeria especially taking what should be an identifiable character and ruining her with shouting, pettiness and jealousy. It smells of someone wanting to focus on the victim, and then trying in vain to make a story around a woman sitting in a wheel chair with a stupid dog underneath the floor boards for some reason, by trying to incite marital drama that has no need to exist.

That said, this was mostly a good movie, and the dead weight in the middle is prime opportunity for a bathroom break or to get some snacks. It does make me think that the Inarritu/Arriaga partnership needed to end. Inarritu is just too good of a filmmaker to keep making these same pictures over and over again. I wonder what he can do with a narrative that's a bit more focused. Arriaga needs the confidence to fit only one story in his pictures, as the timeline-jumbling everyone-is-connected thing got stale quickly and smells of someone who doesn't have enough confidence in his own work to follow through with an idea. Someone needs to do a proper, feature length film focusing entirely on the Hobo Assassin, he really deserves to shine.

Babel

The last time we saw Alejandro González Iñárritu here on Movies at Random, he had directed 21 Grams, which featured a script fresh from a blender, and got him all sorts of acclaim. Fresh off his new success, Iñárritu went out to the store and bought a new camera and film that wasn't so ridiculously grainy.

This was a good decision, it allowed him to better show off how good a director he is. With Babel, he framed shots like he's never framed before, created some jaw-droppingly brilliant sequences - there's one where deaf girls go clubbing that is an audio-visual feast - and even directed some utterly amazing performances from his actors. This is all extra impressive because the script he used was terrible.

It's one of those stories where everyone's connected in some, mostly arbitrary way. It begins with a couple horny teenage goat herders in the middle east, who get a shiny new gun and decide to try shooting a bus. On the bus are the contenders for passive aggressive couple of the year, played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. As though punished for participating in the most ludicrously vague argument of all time, Blanchett is shot. Their kids go to a wedding in Mexico and there's also a deaf girl being rebellious and horny in Japan, played by Rinko Kikuchi. The Japanese girl is connected in an extremely ludicrous and arbitrary manner, but it's the strongest part of the movie, so I'll let that slide.

The problem with the script is that, for the most part, it's quite difficult to care about the characters. The attractive American couple is whiny, though they did go on a vacation with a group that is apparently made up of the worst people in the world. Seriously, if someone's wife got shot in your tour group, would you constantly complain when he tries to get help and then sneak away when he's not looking? Their kids are blessed with a story which is pretty pointless until the end, but then they're thrown into a situation because their guardian's nephew is exceedingly stupid, a common source of conflict in the film - it's presented as communication problems, but cultural differences don't make someone has jaw droppingly dumb as the nephew. Hey, I'm going to be as shifty as possible crossing the border! That's not going to cause any problems. Then there's the deaf girls, who could have easily become a horribly simplistic exploration of teen angst with a dose of mild disability - and briefly do, in a scene in a car so awkwardly written it seems straight out of Degrassi Junior High - except for one major factor.

Kikuchi saves the teenage rebellion purely through her performance. She is absolutely amazing, giving one of the best performances I have ever seen. She doesn't play deaf as a gimmick, and she doesn't just do regular teenage angst. The character is given a vulnerability and a soul far beyond what is written in the script, and from thin air she gives the average horny teenager a depth that a lesser actress couldn't even hint at. She's drawing from something that's not on the page, creating a character that is completely her own, identifiable, and sympathetic, when it could have easily not been. It feels like she was written deaf for easy sympathy - she's trying to seduce all these guys, but come on, deaf! - but Kikuchi doesn't need that. You care about what happens to this girl, and it's all in the performance.

Between her and Iñárritu, I wondered what will happen when they've got a good script to work with. It's such a shame that this script isn't. It likes to think it's good, trying to make points about American foreign policy, illegal immigration, and how people with disabilities are treated, but it does such a bad job of it. The worst part is the dialog, which is frequently a hodgepodge of cliches, and is simply wooden when that won't do. You can see that it's trying to be clever, from the title - Get it, tower of Babel! Bible! And there are like, ten different languages! And people just don't understand each other! - to the whole connected storyline thing, but it feels very amateurish. Conflict is all easily avoidable but the characters are so overwhelmingly idiotic that it seems inevitable, and they're all so poorly drawn that you can't really identify with them or even care. Separated from the fractured timeline gimmick of 21 Grams, the weaknesses in characterization and plotting start coming to the surface, and you feel Guillermo Arriaga piles on the gimmicks to hide the fact that he's just not very good at writing.

Yet, this movie is worth watching, because Iñárritu and Kikuchi don't let the bad dialog and often inept plotting get them down. Often, when a sequence doesn't have words, it's visually, aurally, and technically amazing. Those two are masters of their craft, and know exactly how to use their skills to maximum effect. Babel in the hands of a different director would have been a disaster, as would the deaf girl segment, but as it is, it's entirely worth watching, and can even be affecting. Next time though, get a better script, will you guys?

21 Grams

Imagine, for a moment, that you've just written a script. It's going to be made into a movie starring Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro and Naomi Watts. That's a pretty exciting proposition, but on the way to the script meeting, you drop it and all the papers are scattered around. Do you, a) carefully reconstruct the script in the proper running order, maintaining some sort of sensible continuity, or b) just shove it all together not paying too much mind to how it's all fitting together, hoping that you can pass it off as some sort of innovative non-linear story.

If you selected b, congratulations, you're Guillermo Arriaga, and that script got you nominated for a bunch of awards.

I'm not being fair, but I couldn't help but feel that the movie begins in a disorganized jumble. Scenes happen without any clear indication of how they relate to the other scenes, or how they could possibly fit into a greater narrative framework. As soon as you get a glimmer of what's going on, the scene changes and there's no clear indication how you got where you are. Sean Penn flits randomly between healthy and sick, Naomi Watts and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Benicio del Toro is in jail, and then not in jail, and then he's got a different haircut. There is no indication of where the present is, and the discordant jumble constantly keeps you guessing at the relation of all the characters.

So, you might expect that I'd hate it. I didn't like the unnecessary non-linearity of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, for example. I've made it clear that gimmickry doesn't fly with me if I don't think it serves the story. Given just how random the scene order seems at first, you might expect me to hate this movie almost at principle. Here's the thing though, this is a gimmick that actually works, it's not just there to show off how clever the filmmakers are.

The important thing is that since you don't know the chronology, you don't know how anyone knows each other, so you begin to wonder how everyone relates to each other. It's a mystery whether or not Naomi Watts and Sean Penn know each other in the present, or the future, and their relationship calls into question the source of his illness. Some scenes make you wonder if he's part of the reason Benicio del Toro went to jail and found Jesus. Or, it makes you wonder if del Toro will soon lose Jesus. It makes a mystery out of a story which might not work very well if it was told in a conventional manner. In short, the gimmick makes the film a lot more interesting than it would be otherwise.

I'm deliberately avoiding details of the story, I can see the gimmick getting old on repeat viewings when you know what's going to happen. But if that's the case, then just wait until the second hour, when the film begins to gel into something a bit more conventionally told, but no less intriguing. All of the characters are mired in internal conflicts, and it becomes about the external conflicts and problems those lead to. It's a big shared existential crisis, mostly stemming from a moment that is never on screen but is always present once you learn of it.

I could see this being off putting at first. It doesn't start to make sense for a while, and the deliberately lo-fi filming style with high grain and constant handheld camerawork doesn't lend itself to accessibility. Stick with it, and you'll find yourself hooked, curious about how the apparent mess will eventually resolve itself. Once you're hooked, you'll discover a great story told in a very compelling way, and I'm not sure about you, but that's what I watch movies for.