Babel

“Truth is a function of language.” – Tim O’ Brien

Have you ever had a dream where your life was suddenly in immediate danger? You look around desperately for help, and discover a figure walking in the distance. You attempt to cry out for help, but the only thing that comes out of your mouth is dead air. Try as you may to scream and wail, your vocal chords elicit nothing more than an empty silence, and the remote stranger remains ignorant of your dilemma before finally disappearing. Thus, the failure to communicate leads to your own certain doom. This is precisely the predicament faced by all the characters in Babel, a multi-cultured ensemble-piece that plays like an escalating nightmare.

Widowed businessman Yasujiro, played by Japanese superstar Koji Yashuko, sells a gun to Moroccan villager Hassan – Abdelkader Bara – who presents it as a gift to his neighbors, a family of shepherds. Although the gun is meant to protect their animals from nearby predators, the family’s two mischievous boys – Said Tarchani and Boubker Ait El Caid – decide to practice their marksmanship with different targets. One of their stray bullets hits a bus of American tourists, severely injuring Susan – Cate Blanchett – whose inexplicable vacation with her husband Richard – Brad Pitt – had already gone sour.

As Richard struggles to find medical attention for Susan in the middle of the Berber desert, their prolonged absence at home forces nanny Amelia – Adriana Barraza – to drag the couple’s small children – Nathan Gamble and Elle Fanning – to a family wedding she’s due at in Mexico. While being driven back to America by inebriated nephew Santiago – Gael Garcia Bernal – they become the subject of suspicious scrutinizing from police officers at the border crossing. Meanwhile, Yasujiro’s deaf teenage daughter Chieko – Rinko Kikuchi – utilizes her budding sexuality to ease the pain of her motherless, adolescent loneliness.

For most filmmakers, there are enough plotlines here to satisfy half a dozen narratives, yet for Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, this densely layered, fractured structure is entirely commonplace. As in his previous work, Amores Perros and 21 Grams, Inarritu studies how a seemingly coincidental tragedy can powerfully link the lives of complete strangers. Yet unlike last year’s Best Picture winner Crash, Paul Haggis’s moral parable on racism, Babel is far more complicated and bleak in its portrait of global miscommunication. And while Crash was aimed directly at the audience’s emotions, Babel’s singular focus on its enormous plot detracts from the character development necessary to fully engage viewers on an intimate level. This leaves the audience with considerably more questions than answers at the final ambiguous fade out.

What we’re left with, however, is a collection of excellent performances, and some of the most singularly riveting moments to be seen in a movie theater this year. Blanchett and Pitt make the most of their limited screen time and underdeveloped roles, while Kikuchi scorches the screen with her fearlessly raw American debut. Perhaps the most devastating performance is from Barraza, who also co-starred in Amores Perros, and infuses her angelically contrived role with tremendous amounts of maternal warmth and authentic humanity. There’s a sequence where she wanders hopelessly in a desert, clad in a festive red dress, while flailing her arms to attract the attention of a far-off vehicle. Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography photographs her to look like a red smudge on a desolate sandy landscape, and the resulting image is as stark and haunting as any nightmare you could imagine.

Yet the best thing in the film is the editing by Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione, which somehow manages to thematically unify the characters’ struggles, while rarely ever allowing the audience to become confused. The editor’s mastering of pace also allows the audience to catch its collective breath between moments of agonizing intensity. With a storyline so detailed, however, it was probably inevitable that Guillermo Arriaga’s script would fail at allowing the characters to develop naturally as individuals before becoming twisted around by the pretzel-shaped plot. Babel is therefore intellectually and viscerally stimulating, but falls short of capturing the heart.

By addressing so many relevant issues, such as the faceless threat of terrorism and the persecution of illegal aliens, Inarritu is unsuccessful at truly doing any of them justice. His anti-Bush stance is clear, as a picture of the President is seen in the office of monstrously ignorant border patrolmen who come off as nothing more than villainous caricatures. Yet there is truth in the filmmaker’s indictment of world cultures who would rather talk over each other before making any attempt to mutually communicate. Babel’s overall idea seems to be that the majority of world conflicts are a product of miscommunication, and considering the cultural entanglements of the present, it’s an idea worth considering. Although truth is a function of language, isn’t it possible that our varied languages may be attempting to communicate the same truth?

Rating: *** (out of *****)