The Big Picture: Brilliance Beyond the Border

On Oscar night, Feb. 25, three gentlemen will be seated in the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, each hoping to win an Academy Award or two. Just as fervently, they’ll be rooting for one another, for they are compadres from Mexico City. It simplifies matters that they are not in direct competition. Alejandro González Iñárritu, who made Babel, is up for Best Picture and Best Director. Guillermo del Toro, writer-director of Pan’s Labyrinth, has been nominated in the Foreign Film and Original Screenplay categories. Alfonso Cuarón, the director of Children of Men, could be onstage for Adapted Screenplay and Editing–and for Pan’s Labyrinth too, should it win the Foreign award. Cuarón was one of the film’s producers.

Not bad for a trio of auteurs from a country best known in the U.S. recently for sending six million or so illegals (and millions of legals) across the border. Cuarón, del Toro and González Iñárritu are Mexican immigrants even Lou Dobbs could love.

The Motion Picture Academy loves them too. Babel earned seven Oscar nominations, Pan’s Labyrinth six. That’s more than The Departed or Letters from Iwo Jima or Little Miss Sunshine received, and just short of Dreamgirls’ eight.

More important than the awards, though, is the rare mix of ambition and imagination on display in the Mexicans’ films. Babel, written by Oscar nominee Guillermo Arriaga, is a sprawling story of chance and destiny; a random gunshot from a reckless Moroccan boy triggers anguished events in Mexico, the U.S. and Japan. Children of Men conjures up a future world with no future: the human race has become infertile, and anarchy blankets the globe. Pan’s Labyrinth burrows into the past, to Franco’s Spain in 1944, and into a dark wonderland of fierce and magical creatures that offers escape to an 11-year-old girl on the cusp of puberty and despair. Each film toys with the implausible but creates a movie world that is both coherent and compelling –a testament to their directors’ passion, craft and gigantic nerve.

Win or lose–whether González Iñárritu, del Toro and Cuarón come away with a half-dozen Oscars or none–their individual and collective eminence is great news for international cinema. And for Hollywood too. American movies are in their most artless, complacent period since, I don’t know, ever. Somebody’s got to shake the place up, and it might as well be the Mexicans.

They’re old friends, you see, each ready to lend a hand in the other’s projects. They also encourage family and friends to join the fun. Cuarón’s brother Carlos will soon direct a film starring Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, the two lads from Alfonso’s hit comedy Y tu mamá también. Arriaga has written a true-life AIDS drama, The Dallas Buyer’s Club, which is to star and be produced by a member of the Babel ensemble: Brad Pitt.

As close as they are, the three directors do not share any particular aesthetic; they’d never devise a Dogme-style manifesto of belligerent minimalism. Their rule is No Rules.

The films by Cuarón, 45, have been all over the place, artistically and geographically. Of his six feature films, only two are set in Mexico. He has made movies from Dickens (Great Expectations) and Rowling (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban). González Iñárritu, 43, is more single-minded; his three features (Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel), all written by Arriaga, form a trilogy on the consequences of random acts. As for del Toro, 42, he makes monster movies–in Mexico (Cronos), the U.S. (Blade II, Hellboy) and Spain (The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth). Sometimes the great beast is fascism.

In Hollywood the monster is inertia. American movies still dominate the world marketplace, so who cares if they mostly stink? The rule there is It’s broke–don’t fix it. That straitjacket doesn’t suit the Mexican three. Unlike earlier generations of directors who emigrated from Europe to California and stayed there, these guys make films in Hollywood only when it suits them. With Blade II grossing $155 million worldwide, and Hellboy nearly $100 million, del Toro could have made any old horror film. Instead, he made a wonderful new one, in Spanish.

And González Iñárritu hatched an unlikely four-country political epic that is considered a front runner for the Best Picture Oscar. The Academy has never given its top prize to a film in which English was not the primary language; Babel’s in six of them.

Babel, Pan’s Labyrinth and Children of Men, like any wildly ambitious films, have their detractors. For this critic, only del Toro’s works completely. But all three films can boast daring political positions and a strong, racing pulse. These movies move. And so, ever upward, do the restless careers of our three caballeros. I’d like to think they’re the future of movies.