BABEL
Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu Stars: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael Garcia Bernal, Koji Yakusho, Rinko Kikuchi, Yuko Murata, Clifton Collins jr, Michael Pena, R D Call, Elle Fanning, Nathan Gamble, Adriana Barraza
Reviewed by PETER MALONE
A very fine film.
Writer Guillermo Arriaga brings his now famous skill in presenting several interwoven stories while playing with timelines (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and winner of the 2005 Cannes award for screenplay, Melquiades Estrada). Director Inarritu shows great sensitivity, impressive craft and finesse as he moves with ease from the deserts and mountains of Morocco to the deserts and villages of Mexico to the neon brightness of central Tokyo. There is an arresting score and such vivid photography that the landscapes become characters in the stories. Inarritu and Arriaga have opted to be more accessible than in their previous films.
Many of the cast are non-professionals, especially in the Moroccan stories where the family in the mountains, especially the two young boys, stand out. A number of deaf students appear in the Japanese story. And Mexican Inarritu is able to create a wedding celebration with exuberant Hispanic verve.
The stars are excellent as well. Brad Pitt gives a strongly tender performance, only broken in the loud and demanding American way when he is at his wit’s end. Cate Blanchett could have limited herself to an almost passive role but she brings vitality to the wounded wife. Gael Garcia Bernal grins and whoops a lot until the American border guards drive him to desperation. In Japan, Koji Yakusho is a widowed father who is at a loss to communicate with his deaf daughter (a tour-de-force performance from Rinko Kikuchi). Adriana Barraza as the American children’s nanny ensures that the Mexican story is emotional and moving.
Babel is the Genesis image: God confounds the human race by creating languages, confusion, misinterpretation. Inarritu notes that while languages separate (Moroccan from American, Spanish from English, Japanese from sign language), there is a common human spine, a common human core. Suffering can destroy but it can also lead to transformation and reconciliation.
The misunderstanding theme is very strong as Americans, especially amid the apprehensions from the war against terrorism, are prone to fear the worst and interpret more straightforward events in a sinister way. An accidental shooting becomes an alert against fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. Just being a Mexican at the American border can lead to frayed tempers, presumptions of guilt and the unnecessarily heavy hand of the law.
The other theme concerns consequences of actions and responsibility, where disasters can follow from a boast, a rivalry, a lie, a good-hearted decision that can be threatened by legal action.
Reviewed by MARCUS SINCLAIR
Everyone keeps telling me - those whose knowledge and critical acumen I respect, and those who have none of either and keep mouthing what they have heard – that Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Babel is a work of art - a masterpiece.
Perhaps it is, but for me I found it over indulgent, far too long and frightfully depressing without the cathartic effect of say Antigone, the Theban plays, Hamlet or Lear and without the psychological or philosophical depth that lifts them into greatness. Surely, you will ask, does a work have to have the above mentioned to achieve such? And my reply would be yes if it were a tragedy that Babel pretends it is.
Actually, this film is nothing more than melodrama. Its characters are little people like those in, for example, La Boheme whose problems and situations are small scale, but with Puccini we momentarily weep for we are swept into their world and become a part of it as if by magic - a world of longing, of suffering, of sadness. This is art in miniature, and it, too, is light years away from what Inarritu is trying to achieve and from what many believe and keep telling that he has.
Inarritu's characters, diverse as they are, don't really grip us. Nothing in his film, either visually or aurally, moves us to any great degree, nor does anything linger in the mind long after the experience is over like those great moments one finds in a Ford, Ophuls, Kurosawa, Welles or a Hitchcock movie.
The film's construction is clever with its four overlapping stories: two set in Morocco, one in Japan, the other in Mexico. Its main concern, as the title suggests, is difficulty with communication, not only between those who speak the same language, but those who partially do, and those who don't speak it at all, due to lack of education, age, physical defects, and cultural differences. It also deals with rigid bureaucratic red tape, the struggle for and the abuse of power, and self-interest, yet from amid all these difficulties there emerges a compassion that transcends age and cultural boundaries.
Filmed on location in three different countries, the unique atmosphere of each has been captured, and the director has generally managed to obtain fine performances from his professional and non-professional players, though Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett are a bit hard to be taken seriously. Verdict: interesting? Yes! A masterpiece? No - far from it!