Babel
Screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga; idea by Guillermo Arriaga and Alejandro González Iñárritu
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu
Paramount Vantage
2006
Rating:


Director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga specialize in making hyper-stylized, dislinear films of mutually shared misery. Their debut "Amores Perros" took the "Pulp Fiction" approach, splitting the movie up into separate "short stories" that were connected by a car crash. The powerful "21 Grams" also featured a unifying crash, although the time-jumbled approach in that film felt like a cut-and-paste job that attempted to hide the story's soap opera dynamics.

"Babel" brings to fruition the Iñárritu-Arriaga mode of storytelling, making perfect use of Arriaga's non-linear narrativity while turning the unifying event into a commentary on globalization. (The film also marks the final entry in Arriaga's "Death Trilogy" and his final collaboration with the reportedly egotistical Iñárritu, who banned Arriaga from "Babel's" Cannes premiere). There's no crash here, although "Babel's" detractors have compared the film to Paul Haggis' Best Picture winner. Those critics seem to have missed the point entirely. "Crash" poorly deployed "Magnolia's" magic realism to come to the less-than-enlightening conclusion that, despite our differences, we're all in this together. "Babel" is more tentatively hopeful while being more interested in demonstrating that, in a world that's increasingly shrinking through global interdependence, a failure to communicate and grasp the far-reaching effects of our actions can yield tragedy.

Americans Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett) vacation in Morocco in hopes of escaping the tragedy they experienced at home in San Diego. Through a series of delicately rendered scenes, it soon becomes apparent they lost a child to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and each at least subconsciously holds the other responsible for the baby's death. Meanwhile a family of Berber goat herders buys a rifle to fend off coyotes. The father gives the gun to his sons Ahmed (Said Tarchani) and Yussef (Boubker Ait El Caid) to use while tending to the animals. Eager to prove who the best shot is, they push each other to fire at an approaching bus far off in the distance. Yussef innocently hits the bus and sparks an international incident when Americans consider the shooting an act of terrorism. In San Diego, Richard and Susan's housekeeper Amelia (Adriana Barazza) takes care of the couple's children Debbie (Elle Fanning) and Mike (Nathan Gamble). When Richard and Susan are delayed from coming home, Amelia, an illegal immigrant, is forced to take the children with her to attend her son's wedding in Mexico with her impulsive nephew Santiago (Gael García Bernal). And in Tokyo, deaf Chieko (an amazingly raw Rinko Kikuchi) desperately attempts to make a human connection by any means possible in the wake of her mother's death.

Intertwining four separate yet irrevocably connected narratives, set in four different countries and told in seven different languages (English, Spanish, Japanese, Japanese sign, Berber, French and the Moroccan Arabic dialect of Durija), "Babel" certainly contains the ambition of its Biblical namesake. Fortunately Arriaga's script is more structurally sound than that ill-fated tower, even if some cracks are showing. Arriaga's miserabilism and insistent fatalism, less forced here than in "21 Grams," preordains many of the characters' outcomes so that their irrational choices are the result of fate rather than fully realized psychology; they're merely devices in Arriaga's machine. To be fair, it is a remarkable narrative engine that handles the individual plots with intimacy while impressively placing them in a global context.

Iñárritu's direction is even more imposing. He and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto ("Brokeback Mountain") create breathtaking compositions of Morocco's sandy vistas, a Mexican wedding and the wrinkles in Pitt's face. His kinetic approach to the material makes each section feel like a shard from a mirror, broken and jagged yet all a part of the same reflection of the world. Iñárritu's sensory investment in Arriaga's story frequently elevates it above the misery of the melodrama.

The flaws of "Babel" are far outweighed by the brazen brilliance of its execution. An emotional juggernaut, "Babel's" is a bravura depiction of interconnected suffering that devastates.

Posted Saturday, January 20, 2007

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/babel