Babies, A Review
by Kelly Winer
Watch five seconds of Focus Features’ newly released documentary Babies and your parental triggers will fire a hundred “Awww!”s into your bloodstream. The film follows four newborns from four countries, bridging racial, socioeconomic, and gender divides with multicultural cuteness; the film’s message, after all, is one of cross-cultural commonalities. As the tagline reads and shots of international tenderhearted childrearing confirms, “Everybody Loves Babies.” Showcasing the humanity of marginalized populations of the world is an honorable feat for a movie to accomplish, and Babies does this by following Bayar, an infant from Mongolia, and Ponijao, an infant from Namibia, in addition to two infants from the so-called “developed” world. However, by focusing on universal aspects of babydom like love, cuteness, and toddler antics, the gravely disconcerting differences between the babies’ home countries can only be hinted at.
Babies does present an image of economic inequality. Audiences cannot help but infer the relative wealth associated with the countries of Hattie and Mari, Babies’ subjects from the United States and Japan, respectively. Hattie and Mari live in gleaming urban homes packed with every toy and childrearing novelty imaginable. Bayar and Ponijao, meanwhile, live in one-room huts.
Although Babies shows a number of such juxtapositions, the film lets them go unexplained. Viewers might be struck by the contrast of Hattie and Bayar’s births; Hattie enters the world studded with high-tech, expensive medical equipment while Bayar is wrapped in a blanket at a clearly inferior clinic. The implications of such unequal medical care, however, are not addressed. Access to medical facilities like the one where Hattie was born can mean the difference between life and death; Mongolia, shown anecdotally by the film to have relatively poorly equipped medical facilities, has an infant mortality rate six times that of the United States. With even fewer health resources, Ponijao’s Namibia has an infant mortality rate seven and a half times that of the United States. The repercussions of poor medical systems carry far beyond infanthood, however; due in part to inadequate medical care, Hattie can be expected to live ten years longer than Bayar and twenty-six years longer than Ponijao.
Birth, of course, is only the start of what will be Babies’ subjects’ wildly unequal trajectories. Nearing toddlerhood, Mari and Hattie are read to and brought to preschool. Bayar and Ponijao receive no such early education, and their countries’ literacy rates reflect this. The legacy of uneven access to education can be found in the background of Babies; the parents whose footsteps the infants are toddling behind engage in very different occupations from country to country. Mari and Hattie’s parents are cellphone toting professionals who can afford prime real-estate and time off to play with their newborns. Bayar’s parents toil at farming so vigorously that they miss their child’s first steps, and Ponijao’s parents seem to be employed solely in the craft of surviving dire poverty.
Thus, Babies’ feel-good message that All Babies Are Created Equal is eclipsed by global social stratification that grows as the infants do.
Kelly Winer studies Social Wellfare at UC Berkeley and is an MCLI summer intern.