Babel

Review By: Stephen Snart
StephenSnart@TheCinemaSource.com

In the opening scene of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, a Moroccan farmer gives his two children a rifle and orders them to look after the ranch while he and his friend go to town. Before leaving, the two children are given a crude lesson on how to shoot the rifle and strict orders to keep the jackals away from the livestock. The younger child, Yussef (Boubker Ait El Caid), is instantly a better shot than his older brother, Ahmed (Said Tarchani), a point that is reiterated by the father’s teasing. Left alone with not much to do, it isn’t long before the rifle becomes an expression of sibling rivalry.

Babel is full of moments like this. The scene is ripe for great tragedy, but Iñárritu plays things out for as long as possible before enacting the inevitable. The process can be summed up in a single, agonizing shot toward the beginning of the film in which, having already seen the event from a different perspective, we know the outcome of the shot, but it is held for so painstakingly long that we start to question what we’ve already seen.

The Moroccan children and the rifle is one of four interlocking stories in this multi-character narrative. Simultaneously vacationing in Morocco is the wealthy American couple, Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett). Their vacation doesn’t turn out as planned, with disagreements and bickering plaguing them throughout their travels but a cataclysmic event on their tour bus strands the two in a tiny Moroccan village, reevaluating their relationship.

Back home in San Francisco, their Mexican housekeeper, Amelia (Adriana Barraza), is left in charge of their children, Debbie (Elle Fanning) and Mike (Nathan Gamble). Because of Richard and Susan’s demobilizing accident in Morocco, Amelia is forced to work overtime, jeopardizing her ability to attend her son’s wedding in Mexico. “Cancel the wedding, I’ll pay for a bigger one,” the self-centered Richard yells through the phone callously. Unable to find anyone to look after the children, Amelia straps them in the backseat of her nephew, Santiago’s (Gael Garcia Bernal) car and the four drive off to the wedding blissfully. Once they get to the wedding, we realize how uninformed Richard’s wild promises were because no amount of money could make a Mexican wedding any more extravagant than it already is.

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the world, a widowed father, Yasujiro (Koji Yakusho) struggles to connect with his teenage daughter, Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi). Chieko, a deaf-mute, is still coping with her mother’s suicide in addition to tackling the issues of her blossoming sexual curiosity. If this last plot strand seems distanced from the other four, it should initially, but Iñárritu ties it together thematically and ultimately through narrative as well.

For every careful detail of plotting, the stories in Babel are also connected through strong thematic relations like the loss of sexual innocence, the ethnographic spectacle and most predominantly, individuals battling the opposition of bureaucratic institutions. But none of that would mean anything ...