Babel

SCRIBE'S NEVER TAKE A GIFT WEAPON FROM A JAPANESE HUNTER REVIEW:

“Babel” is the aptly titled movie starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett involving several characters and as many languages.

Another in a growing sub-genre of dramas featuring disparate characters in different locations whose seemingly unrelated lives will connect in some significant way by the time the movie ends, this one extends into international territory. I’m a sucker for these films. Crash, Traffic, Magnolia, Reservation Road, 21 Grams are all good to great films. This one falls somewhere in the middle.

With a two and a half hour running time, Babel features four basic stories revolving around a single, mindless incident of violence. Everything has a tumble down effect in this film. The man in Morocco who sells a rifle to his friend obtained the weapon from a different character whose life is in a shambles. The sons of the man who buy the rifle indulge in random target shooting to prove the rifle doesn’t fire as far as claimed. The little tykes wind up firing on a tour bus and one of the bullets strikes a passenger.

What results is a rather convoluted mess, but I don’t mean that in a bad way. The “mess” is what the characters experience. This is a film with a rich tapestry of interwoven tragedies. Pitt is the understandably emotional husband whose wife (Blanchett) is shot. This causes him to call his Mexican nanny whose poor judgment in finding a way to keep her employer’s kids with her while attending her nephew’s wedding in Mexico will have terrible consequences. Meanwhile, The Moroccan police scour the countryside in an attempt to locate the perpetrators of the shooting and prove there are no terrorist cells in their nation. Pitt commands the tour bus driver to take them to the nearest village with a doctor (turns out he’s a “very good” vet) and basically holds his fellow tourists hostage. And somehow, in far off Japan, the sad life of a deaf mute teenage girl whose mother committed suicide connects with these people in ways none will ever know.

If you’ve ever read a David Mitchell novel, this is familiar territory. His novels often feature similar themes of human connectivity, although the underlying story tends to be more substantive.

Babel is beautifully acted by all involved. We already know Pitt and Blanchett can act, but the non-AmerEnglish speaking actors are phenomenal. The fact that the Japanese girl didn’t garner an Oscar for her performance is a criminal offense. It’s well known that the Academy favors performances featuring damaged characters and none are more damaged than her.

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu provides a fever dream style of shooting reminiscent of Soderberg, but with jarring intrusions no doubt designed to keep us awake. There are so specific memorable images but this isn’t a film that calls for such things. The whole point is the random, improbable elements of chance and human experience.

A quality, ambitious film.

**** out of *****

GREEN’S “IS THERE A DOCTOR ON THE BUS?” REVIEW:

This film reminded me a lot of “Magnolia” (which we reviewed here.) because there are several separate stories going on all at the same time, except these stories happen on a worldwide, cross-cultural, multi-lingual scale instead of a local one. The four seemingly unrelated stories are unfolding all at once and only near the end do we realize how the one seemingly disconnected story from all the others is really the angle from which all of this mayhem originates and through which all are connected.

A Moroccan man sells an automatic rifle to a nearby farmer (Mustapha Rachidi), who charges his boys with killing jackals in the desert. Instead, one boy fires the gun at a distant tour bus on the road below to demonstrate the weapon’s apparent lack of range. A Japanese deaf-mute teen (Rinko Kikuchi) is trying to find her place in the social structure of her culture while trying to cope with her disability, the death of her mother and the absence of her working father (Koji Yakusho) who had just been to Morocco on a business trip (a fact we don‘t realize until much later in the film). A Mexican housekeeper/nanny (Adriana Barraza) in San Diego is forced to take the two American children she is watching to her son’s wedding across the border in Mexico, because the parents are away on vacation in Morocco. Two American tourists (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) are sitting at an outdoor café in Morocco arguing. Later they are riding on a tour bus through the desert when a stray bullet...

Of course there’s more depth and detail to the story than I’m telling you. You’ll have to watch to find out the rest, but you get the idea.

Babel isn't only about (intentional or unintentional, it doesn't matter) gun violence and its tragic consequences. It's about communication and/or the lack of it. It is also about how much of a global community our world has become, where one seemingly innocuous event can have consequences reaching around the world and across cultures.

The film doesn’t lack in its share of indelible moments, many of which are pretty stark and grim and yet the story doesn’t lose any of its potency or emotional impact. This film’s run time of 143 minutes is much more palatable than that of Magnolia (which was 45 minutes longer...)

Interesting to me is the film’s title: no doubt derived from the multi-cultural, multi-language barrier for the different story lines and is certainly an indirect reference to the Biblical events depicted in Genesis 11:1-9 {go ahead and look it up… you know you want to.}

The seemingly unrelated stories are brilliantly edited together by writers Guillermo Arriaga and Alejandro González Iñárritu, who also directed (they also collaborated on “21 Grams” which was reviewed here.) the film. The film’s headliner stars are Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, who both give remarkable performances, along with the rest of the ensemble cast giving fine performances all around.

Babel was nominated for seven Academy Awards in 2006, including Best Picture, Best Director and two nods for Best Supporting Actress (Barraza and Kikuchi). Surprisingly, Babel only took home one Oscar, for Best Achievement in Music. That’s ironic to me because I hardly noticed the music while I was watching, so involved in the story I was. It didn’t bother me one bit that the two Best Supporting Actress nominees, despite excellent performances, didn’t win. Pitt or Blanchett, the film’s biggest names, could have just as easily been nominated.

I’ll admit that sometimes I end up buying the DVD’s of the movies that we review here. Even though the film is gripping and definitely worthwhile to watch, it is not a film that I would choose to see again anytime soon.

***½ out of *****


Babel (2006, R, 143 minutes) starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Mustapha Rachidi, Rinko Kikuchi, Adriana Barraza and Koji Yakusho. The film was written by Guillermo Arriaga and Alejandro González Iñárritu and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu.