By Jim Seymour
For Variety

HAVING recently encountered the films Memento, Syriana, and the astounding Crash, I’ve become struck by the highly original way in which some Hollywood films are now telling their stories. Frankly, I’m wondering why it’s taken so long for screenwriters and producers to recognize the unique opportunities for films to tell numerous stories linked by events that may not be immediately apparent to the audience.
Perhaps, with their eagerness to please an often complacent public they perceive to be largely interested in spectacle and star power, Hollywood has been unwilling to make their audiences work a little bit. This reluctance seems to have been somewhat overcome, if we note the popularity of the 2006 film Babel.
As directed by Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, who also conceived the original idea, the film jumps from one location and set of characters to another, thereby asking the audience to piece together, as one would a jigsaw puzzle, a larger picture of the world: a global view.
His first puzzle piece reveals a troubled couple (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) in the desert of Morocco, seemingly intent on patching up their ailing marriage. As other pieces come together, we are introduced to a family of Moroccan sheep herders, the young children of Pitt and Blanchett in San Diego, and a beautiful deaf teenager in Tokyo, vying for the attention of her distant father. By the time we’ve gotten halfway through the film, there is no clear thread connecting most of these actions or characters.
Since the advent of talking pictures, the industry has been primarily fed by a dependence on melodrama, the most popular genre of entertainment when the medium was discovered. While experimental films and documentaries have long since moved away from this tradition of storytelling, most commercial films remain, at least in some fashion, sophisticated melodramatic tools. In other words, the audience is asked to invest in the outcome of one (or a few) individuals who remain the focal interest throughout the story. Some of these more recent films appear to have a much broader center.
Syriana never asks the viewer to identify with one individual human dilemma, but chooses rather to bring to light the disturbing realities and consequences of American power in the Middle East.
Crash finds its subject matter in numerous, apparently unrelated, racial skirmishes in Los Angeles, begging us by its end to rethink established stereotypes and attitudes about race in America.
Babel’s creators seem to have a similar thesis in mind, one that suggests we all remain largely unaware of the hidden connections – and the consequences of those connections – that link our modern world. And they succeed in their illumination of these global associations without employing magical realism or some form of underlying spiritual subplot. Their modus operandi involves the sale of one simple item that will in some way impact all of the film’s central characters, reminding us that citizens of the globe have responsibilities that go way beyond their own backyards.
I trust that these novel attempts – more akin to the novel, itself – to explore the means by which stories are told will continue, thanks to the commitment of stars like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, whose contributions obviously empower producers to get their pictures made.
Say what you will about movie stars expressing their political opinions off-camera, the best of them know they can influence the global conversation through their work, once they have garnered enough power to have that influence. Such commitments to innovative projects rarely existed under the studio system and remain largely elusive to the struggling independent filmmaker. So perhaps there is hope for an industry too often content with providing what it thinks the people want.