It Comes from the Village
Cultures and fate collide in the admirably clear-minded "Babel." (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: Serious-minded drama from a serious-minded filmmaker.
The Downside: It's a bit raw, and it never delivers the punch that it should.
The Book of Genesis marks the story of the Tower of Babel, a construction built not only as a spire to Heaven, but also a self-reflective glorification of mankind. In punishment for their hubris, the story says, God confused the tongues of those who were building the tower and scattered them to the corners of the globe- divided peoples cursed forever to live outside each other's sphere, to be constant victims of misunderstanding, miscommunication, and frustration vented through rage.
Babel takes four stories of people separated by culture and language, and yet all pressed together in a common fate. There's the American couple (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) on a vacation to Morocco to escape the nightmare memories of their baby's SIDS death, their kindly Mexican nanny who's watching over the couple's children in San Diego, a father in Japan desperately trying to reign in his wild daughter, and a Moroccan herder who is teaching his children to protect the flock from jackals with a newly purchased .307 rifle.
It's when one of the herder's sons, in a competition to see who's the better shot, shoots a tour bus containing the American couple and thus hits the wife in the neck, that things are put in motion.
The commonality isn't that hard to reach; we've reached an age where the world has become smaller due to opening borders, faster travel, and the Internet, and yet Babel argues that we are as separated as we ever were, the evolution of society and technology only creating more and more layers to place in between us. When the woman is shot, the tour bus is hours from the nearest hospital and has to find refuge in a nearby town while American officials hand-wring about what to do, all the while elevating a case of an accidental shooting to the level of a terrorist attack. Despite the language differences, the curious locals seem to be the only ones willing to help while the other tourists just want to get the hell out of the desert as fast as they can. Meanwhile, the nanny makes the fateful decision to carry the kids along with her across the border for her son's wedding, only to run afoul of the border patrol thanks to her hard-drinking nephew (Gael Garcia Bernal).
This kind of fate-at-the-crossroads is the specialty of director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who presented much the same kind of palette in Amores Perros and 2003's 21 Grams. The stories on their own are compelling, although to varying degrees. Particularly such is the Tokyo tale, about the deaf girl Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) whose world is presented in random blasts of isolated silence on the soundtrack. Cut off from the world, still reeling from the suicide of her mother and under the thumb of a society that hasn't let go of the notion of handicaps as a source of shame easily, Chieko's flung herself into the void, so desperate to feel emotion she loads up on ecstasy in a city park and is so desperate to feel someone's touch she bluntly tries to coerce men into fondling her every chance she gets.
If Babel is a success individually, it isn't that rosy as one total package. Directors like Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson have worked in this medium and have worked well and with them the same kind of dynamic, different background, similar fates, feels cohesive because you feel all of the characters are on a Hell-bent bullet train to the same place. Inarritu, working off a story idea by himself and writer Guillermo Arriaga latches the patchwork of Babel together sturdy enough and for just this reason it gives us twice as much to chew on as an ordinary film- possibly even too much. Maybe it's one too many cutaway shots of the barren hills of Morocco or the unforgiving desert of the Rio Grande basin, or maybe it's one too many musical interludes scored to the same kind of just-above-droning dissonance that Steven Soderbergh made popular, but at rare times Babel runs the risk of imitating its name- at a solid two-and-a-half hours, it feels overburdened by at least twenty.
Even if it is overlong, even if its central theme of a partitioned world gone mad is never cemented and gradually gives to a more simplistic quadriology of interlocking tales, Babel, for the most part, is still an organic and uncomfortably unflinching rush. Its stories do work in dissecting the vast spaces that separate both people (Chieko and her father, for example) or peoples, and do so without the hint of seat-squirming platitudes that, for some, made Crash feel like an employee diversity training seminar set to an ambient soundtrack. Perhaps the source of Babel's internal confusion is the fact that Inarritu is holding off from trying to make his movie into a can't-we-share-the-love abject lesson. His tales work from the ground up; the American who just wants to get a doctor for his wife, the herder who doesn't know the disaster his sons have carried onto him until it is too late. Even the story of Chieko carries itself from just a girl angry at the world to extremes that grow more and more emotionally repellant the further they go. The fact that all these facets don't gel, they don't sing together is a minor but noticeable distraction rather than a major flaw.
The big marquee draw (although those indie fans who made 21 Grams an art house smash aren't going to care less) is Brad Pitt, who's trying to bank some credibility on a "serious" film before his career has the chance to implode the way Tom Cruise's has. It's a benefit to see him working at something more purposeful than Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but Pitt, who plays the husband beleaguered by bureaucrats and language barriers, seems a bit out-aced by those around him who have lived and breathed character drama. Blanchett is one of these, and exhibits far more angry subtlety in a far more limited role.
Babel is worth seeing just as a movie that's about something important sandwiched in between Borat and Casino Royale. It's good, not great; not the kind of heart-splintering masterpiece Amores Perros managed to be, however it has weight, it has important. And it manages to speak its mind with a distinct crystalline of thought. B+
HOME Feedback?
