‘Babe: Pig In The City’ Is A Harrowing Immigrant Drama Disguised As A Children’s Movie

Babe: Pig in the City is a pointed, harrowing immigrant drama. Fans of Babe (Pig in the City is its sequel) stayed away in droves upon its Thanksgiving 1998 release. Honestly, someone at Universal should’ve known something was up when director/co-writer George Miller shot the project in NSW, Australia, half a world away from studio interference. The result is a dark picture laced with unsettling sequences and ideas that remind a great deal of Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, even Walter Murch’s Return to Oz. It’s a kid’s film that goes against the popular demand for safe, edgeless things for kids, though it’s fair to wonder if fairy tales have any usefulness at all without a payload of chaos and cruelty. Despite a last minute trim to try to get the film from “PG” to “G”, Babe: Pig in the City remains a gloriously disturbing, existential, Messiah-driven film. Sandwiched almost exactly midway between two similarly-themed films, Dark City and The Matrix, it’s testament to Miller’s gift for rough hewn prophecy, grim humor, allegorical sociology, Babe: Pig in the City may actually be the most prescient and immediately-relevant of the three.

If the musical theme of the first film is a gentle, lyrical riff of Saint-Saens’s “Symphony No. 3 in C Minor”, the theme of Babe: Pig in the City is Edith Piaf’s rousing “Non, je ne regrette rien,” which was adopted as an anthem in 1961 for a failed coup against Charles de Gaulle. (In that year, the French President decided to withdraw troops from Algeria, dooming pro-French Arabs who had fought alongside them.) It could hardly be a more topical theme for our current mad state as our President announces a unilateral withdrawal from Syria and, in so doing, sentences our Kurdish allies there to death and earns the immediate resignation of our Secretary of Defense. In the film, Piaf’s song underscores hero pig Babe’s (E.G. Daily) regret at his part in accidentally maiming his “Boss”, Hoggett (James Cromwell), in a farming accident. Miller arranges Hoggett in his bed, attended by his wife Esme (Magda Szubanski), a few animals and Babe in a tableaux vivant mirroring the painting “George Washington on His Deathbed” by Junius Brutus Stearns. With head bowed, Babe receives a benediction from his master, the call to action for the hero’s journey delivered by a founding father with Piaf’s anthem pointing the way forward as a path of defiance and pluck.

Babe: Pig in the City is first an exploration of the precariousness of an existence based solely on subsistence agriculture. Hoggett’s health is literally the farm’s solvency. Injured, something wicked comes: “two men in suits, men with pale faces and soulless eyes. Such men could come from only one place: the bank.” To avoid foreclosure, Esme and Babe travel to the City to perform, but are immediately waylaid at the airport by overweening security and invasive interrogations. Their arrest played like slapstick pre-9/11; it doesn’t even register as satire now. Others identify Babe in this strange land as either foreigner or “some kind of alien.” He gains the trust of the City’s residents only after confronting them with their prejudices and demonstrating his ability to contribute materially to the greater social good. He and Esme eventually find shelter in a gothic hotel situated in the exact center of a pop-up, canal-connected melange of every world metropolis. Landmarks like the Eiffel Tower struggle for sky with the Empire State Building, Big Ben, the Sydney Opera House. It’s among the most arresting cityscapes in film, speaking to the idea that if the setting is every city, so its story of fortitude is every story.

Babe: Pig in the City works best as an exploration of the plight of refugees seeking to assimilate in a (self-described) sanctuary. The proprietor of the hotel (Mary Stein) must pretend to loudly turn away asylum-seekers so her intolerant neighbors won’t report her to the authorities before welcoming them in through the side door. When the authorities inevitably arrive, Miller’s extended depiction of the capture of the unfortunates carries echoes of all the times throughout history when the unwanted and disenfranchised have been forcibly relocated to ghettos, prisons, internment camps, and worse. It’s to our shame that we’re headed there again. At the end, when Babe and Esme return to the farm for the film’s unlikely conclusion, the film’s narrator says “it was the pig brought the two worlds together – two broken halves to make something afresh in a place a little to the left of the twentieth century.” Victory is not had through contest or conquest, but through Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature.” And it gets there with all the energy and panache of any of Miller’s Mad Max pictures. It’s a bracing shot of inspiration: the darker it gets, the more important kindness becomes. It could’ve been made yesterday.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due Spring of 2019. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to stream Babe: Pig In The City