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Babel (2006) Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu Cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael García Bernal, Kôji Yajusho, Harriet Walter, Boubker Ait El Caid, Mustapha Rachidi Time: 142 min. Rating: English, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, Berber, sign language with English subtitles |
As the title suggests, Babel is a film about language, but rather than explain how God used language as a barrier to prevent people from cooperating, it explores how people use language as a barrier for isolating and dehumanizing others. Although Iñárritu tackles some lofty themes in Babel, he doesn’t quite reach the cinematic brilliance he achieved in Amores Peres.
Babel intertwines four plot threads into a single story. It opens in Morocco with a villager selling a hunting rifle to a shepherd (Rachidi) so he can protect his flock of goats from jackals. The shepherd hands the gun to his sons, who test its power by targeting vehicles on a distant road. They shoot at a tour bus and accidentally wound an American tourist (Blanchett).
Half a world away in America, a Mexican nanny (Walter) decides to take her two young blonde American charges south of the border for her son’s wedding. (The children’s parents are away, and the nanny can’t find anyone else to watch them.) On the other side of the planet in Japan, a teenage deaf-mute girl (Yajusho) copes with the lose of her mother by acting out in typically adolescent ways. Even though these threads seem totally random, they are actually connected.
What drives the action throughout Babel are impulsive but well-intentioned actions that generate unexpected and undesirable consequences. But what often prompts these actions and spurs the consequences are misinterpretations of reality. The misinterpretations result because the characters speak different languages—verbal and cultural.
The concept of speaking different languages gives Babel its thematic force. The American tourists find themselves searching for medical assistance in a Moroccan village, where they don’t understand the language or the culture. The US government automatically labels the incident a terrorist attack, showing how cultural language can be manipulated to demonize others.
The nanny takes the American children to her village in Mexico, where they can’t communicate with anyone, but verbal language isn’t an issue because they gladly play with the other children once they become comfortable in their surroundings. What presents a problem is the culture language; they unwittingly participate in the beheading of the chickens that will be served during the wedding feast.
The deaf-mute girl can write and sign, but she is incapable of communicating through verbal language. Her world is silent in every possible way, and this lack of language isolates her from everyone, including her friends who are deaf, but not mute. Her extreme language isolation makes other people view her as an outcast, and she considers herself to be a monster.
Despite this intricate play on language (and despite the sophisticated use of temporal shifts), Babel fails for the simplest of storytelling reasons: bad editing and poor character development. Iñárritu should have edited at least 20 seconds from every scene. He gives us plenty of great details, but then he belabors them to the point of tedium.
Iñárritu, who wrote the screenplay, also treats each character’s motivating factor as a defining plot twist, which he presents near the end of the movie. We learn why the Japanese girl acts out in her final scene in the film. We likewise discover why the American tourists are in Morocco near the end of the movie, even though the woman who is shot blatantly asks, “Why are we here?” in her first scene.
Although this narrative decision is interesting, it proves to be fatal because it denies the characters a humanity that we need to empathize or at least sympathize with them. When motivating factors are treated as dramatic climaxes, we find ourselves watching characters we don’t care about performing actions that make no sense to us.
Stylistically and thematically, Babel is a work of art, but Iñárritu’s weak character development ultimately robs it of being a great film. His erroneous choice translates into storytelling babble that weakens the entire narrative.
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