Babel
***
Directed by Alejandro
Gonzalez Inarritu
Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in a scene from Babel, nominated for best picture. (MURRAY CLOSE/AFP/Getty Images)
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Written by Guillermo Arriaga
Starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael Garcia Bernal
Classification: 14A
On holiday in Morocco, an American couple, Richard and Susan (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) are struggling to repair their shaky marriage after the death of a child. While riding on a tour bus, Susan, sitting in the window seat, is jerked out of her sleep by the jolt of a rifle bullet that hits her shoulder. As the blood starts to flow, the husband and other tourists begin to panic and the chain of unforeseen consequences begin to spread like the red stain on her white blouse.
Babel takes its title from the Genesis account of the Tower of Babel, both a story explaining the origins of languages and a typical Old Testament tale of the Lord's punishment for man's pride: When humanity, then speaking one language, attempted to build a tower to the heavens, the Lord descended and caused the builders to speak different languages so they could not continue the work before they were scattered about the Earth. Babel also evokes the cultural schism following the end of those other towers of Sept. 11, 2001, a subject director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu previously represented with his entirely sound-based contribution to the collective film 11'09"01.
For Inarritu and screenplay writer Guillermo Arriaga, Babel is the end of a trilogy (including Amores Perros and 21 Grams) exploring unexpected links between disparate characters through a chain of pain. Babel is ambitious and absorbing for nearly all its 2½-hour running time, as it darts around the world, from Morocco to California, Mexico to Tokyo, embracing the big contemporary themes of terrorism, illegal immigration and generational conflict in the stories of four families.
The shooting is initiated by another drama with Biblical echoes, a kind of modern day Cain and Abel, as two adolescent Moroccan boys, Ahmed (Said Tarchani) and Yussef (Boubker Ait El Caid), squabble for top-dog status as they guard their goats. In a shooting competition, the younger, more cocky brother shoots at a bus on a distant road a couple of kilometres away but is unaware that his bullet has hit anyone.
Later, as Richard and Susan are holed up in a Moroccan village waiting for medical care, the American authorities construe the shooting as a terrorist attack. The husband calls home to his Mexican nanny, Amelia (Adriana Barraza), insisting that she stay with the couple's young children, Debbie (Elle Fanning) and Mike (Nathan Gamble), until they return. She's desperate to go to her son's wedding in a border town near Tijuana and, finally, she takes the kids in her car, driven by her trouble-causing nephew, Santiago (Gael Garcia Bernal) to Mexico.
Back in Africa, the local police crack down and before long trace the rifle to a Japanese widower and father of an angry deaf teenaged daughter who gave his weapon to a Moroccan guide after a hunting trip. The daughter Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) is acting out her grief over her mother's recent death with angry outbursts and aggressive sexuality.
Though various characters are more sympathetic than others, there's no clear moral link between behaviour and outcome. Nor, in fact, do the thin plot connections between various stories seem significant although, by the film's uneven final third, when two stories involve children in jeopardy, the filmmakers risk seeming manipulative, demanding emotional responses that haven't been earned.
Though Babel lacks any tragic sense of inevitability, it almost compensates with a handful of vibrant performances and the palpable physical texture of the settings. The 42-year-old Pitt, looking grey and grizzled, is persuasive as the husband, breaking through his emotional shell when his wife is injured (though Blanchett is too busy being semi-conscious to do much acting). Most of the dramatic heavy-lifting is left to the two women who carry the Mexican and Japanese segments: Barraza as the nanny who goes from beloved family member to hunted alien during one bad night, and Kikuchi, who, in spite of her demure schoolgirl uniform, has the ferocious intensity of a panther in heat.
With a restlessly moving camera, and a story that slides back and forth in time, Babel gives an impression of snippets of melodrama caught on the fly, then suddenly immerses the viewer in a specific aural and visual maelstrom: the rollicking wedding in a Mexican border town, experienced by fearful but excited American children; the world of the deaf girl in contemporary Tokyo, as Chieko, drunk and stoned, wanders through a disco and the sound switches from pounding noise to overwhelming silence. Perhaps consistent with its theme of a global communications meltdown, Babel may not be quite sure what it wants to say, but these are the poles of contemporary terror it marks out: Drowning in noise, entrapped in silence.
