Babel (2006)

(out of four)

By David N. Butterworth

Ba•bel [bey-buhl] [bab-buhl] -noun 1. (usually lowercase) a confused mixture of sounds or voices; 2. (usually lowercase) a scene of noise and confusion; 3. babel, confusion; mixture. Or, biblically-speaking (Genesis 11:1-11), 4. an ancient city (now thought to be Babylon) in Shinar where God confounded a presumptuous attempt by Noah’s descendants to build a tower into heaven by confusing the language of its builders into many mutually incomprehensible tongues.

In the case of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel we have instead a presumptuous attempt by the Mexican filmmaker (in partnership with his favorite screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga) to recreate the success of his previous two features (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) by once again weaving several intricately interlaced storylines into one coherent–and blistering–whole (through, in this case, the confusion of its characters’ mutually incomprehensible languages).

This globe-trotting saga first touches down in Morocco, where a pair of young brothers with a newly obtained rifle option a tour bus for target practice and accidentally wound one of its occupants (played by Cate Blanchett; Brad Pitt is her distraught American husband soon fighting to obtain emergency medical aid). As a result of these complications abroad–which tend to spark less the international incident than a tenuously-linked connection between various distaff parties–the touring couple’s two school-age children find themselves whisked down south of the border (by Iñárritu regular Gael García Bernal) so that their Mexican nanny Amelia (Adriana Barraza) can attend her son’s wedding. On the other side of the world, a deaf-mute Japanese girl (Rinko Kikuchi) struggles to come to grips with her mother’s suicide; her detached father is a former hunter who recently donated a high-caliber rifle to his Moroccan guide as a thank you gift.

And then there’s this Ba•bel•ic [bey-bel-ik, ba-] confusion, this tumult, turmoil, uproar, bedlam, clamor, that appears so prevalent in the previews–the inability of people to be understood by those around them–yet somehow seems strangely diminished in the film proper. It rears its hostile, exasperating head again in the Tokyo sequences, when Chieko (Kikuchi) labors to make herself understood on the volleyball court, or at the J-Pop, or in her father’s pedantic presence, but too often comes across as bombastic; old. The Mexico scenes are less affecting since Amelia’s two young charges seem to have at least some basic comprehension of the language being spoken around them.

Hamstrung by the forced complexities of Arriaga’s script the film strikes an uneven balance between its star packaging and infinitely less-recognizable leads. Blanchett is certainly underutilized, as is Bernal, and Pitt plays little more than panic-stricken. On the other hand Barraza is consistently strong as the beleaguered caregiver and Kikuchi shows much dramatic range amid her out-and-out chutzpah. The popular Japanese actor Kôji Yakusho (who plays Chieko’s father) receives top-billing but his part barely registers as a supporting one; more significant are the two young men who play the hapless shooters.

All told, Babel is a well-intentioned–and finely acted–tower of power that might have worked better had its theme of universal communication difficulties been better integrated. After the remarkable Amores Perros and 21 Grams I had hoped to be floored by Babel; instead I found it sadly flawed.