Posted: 10/25/2006

Babel

(2006)

by Aaron Riccio

Crash is to Babel as artificial flavoring is to the real thing. Alejandro González Iñárritu, who proved his artistic chops in the violently beautiful Amores Perros (only to dull his vision for the monotonous 21 Grams) is back atop his game with a film that’s more interested in character than charting political undercurrents (Syriana), giving different perspectives on the same incident (Traffic), or demonstrating the human talent to uselessly connect random events (Magnolia). These characters, linked only by their humanity, anchor the globetrotting narratives (Japan, Morocco, and the thin line between Mexico and California).

Only the Morocco tangent is unique—two young, lighthearted goat herders accidentally shoot an American tourist, leaving the injured woman and her husband stranded in a doctorless village. It’s a rare opportunity to see a helpless Brad Pitt—his fine acting alone is worth a ticket (though he’s upstaged by the Spanish actress Adriana Barraza). For the other two stories, Iñárritu is forced to be more visually creative: there’s nothing “new” in the story of a depressed teen, even if she’s Japanese and deaf-mute, and the precarious plight of the Mexican immigrant has been a hot topic for years. For the Japanese sequences, Iñárritu adapts a more high-tech cinematography, slick right down to the expert editing of a trippy rave scene. He also plays around the sound—when he mutes it to emphasize the narrator’s condition, the silence is deafening. The other segment leaps from the safety of America to the excitement of a traditional Mexican wedding (chickens you pull the heads right off of), shot in earthen tones and a professionally assembled hodgepodge of warm, familial scenes. The impromptu border crossing, so clever that it’s contrived, is just another visual layer to an impressive global worldview of filmmaking.

Babel overreaches a bit to make for tidy conclusions—a newscaster toward the end of the film pokes fun at this when he comments on Americans and their happy endings. The stark helplessness of these characters is reversed with a simple beat, which sort of minimizes the effect of watching a tear well up in a nanny’s eye, the American Dream ebbing along with it as it rolls down her cheek. There’s also some questionable acting in the Japanese scenes—the double remove of common language and the human voice makes it hard to relate to the protagonist, a person reduced to giggles, glares, and bouts of uncontrolled nudity. Stormy seas like this are fine—in fact, they raise the bar—so long as the director can chart a course through them. Iñárritu weathers the worst of it with such professional grace it just makes the film’s good spots glow all the brighter.

Those expecting a greater significance than the day-to-day lives of ordinary people in different cultures—the title is a bit overzealous—may leave the theater disappointed. That’s their loss. As a character study, as a film study, as a life study, Babel succeeds at picking up our fragmented post-Babel worlds and jigsawing them back into a cohesive picture (though some forcing is, of course, required): after all, tragedy was the first universal language.

Aaron Riccio is a film and theatre critic living in New York City. Check out his blog here.

Got a problem? E-mail us at filmmonthly@gmail.com