You might expect a movie titled “Babel” (related to the Biblical Tower of Babel) to explore language barriers, miscommunications, and miscommunication. But would you expect a movie about communication to take an uncomfortably long 142 minutes to get the message across?
Paramount Vantage’s “Babel” is the latest film from director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who also served as co-producer with Steve Golin and Jon Kilik. The story begins in a desolate region of the Moroccan desert where two brainless boys decide to see how far a new rifle can shoot by using a crowded tour bus as target practice. A bullet critically insults an American woman (Cate Blanchett) who along with her husband (Brad Pitt) is recovering from the death of her baby. This new tragedy follows a series of previous tragedies (including the suicide of a Japanese woman) and begins another series of tragedies (including the deportation of the couple’s illegal immigrant nanny, beautifully played by Adriana Barraza).
With the strong and abrasive action jumping back and forth across time, and from one place to another (Morocco, Japan, the United States and Mexico), and from one story to another, this is an exhaustive film to follow. In one story, the two Moroccan boys and their dysfunctional family try to escape justice. In a related but separate story, the American couple (played with great sincerity and passion by Pitt and Blanchett) struggle in a life-and-death situation with the help of incompetent, yet sympathetic, locals from a nearby town. Meanwhile, in California, the couple’s children are being cared for by a loving Mexican nanny who foolishly takes the children with her nephew (Gael García Bernal) to a wild wedding party across the border. In yet another story, with the tenuous of thematic threads connecting them, a deaf-mute Japanese teenager (Rinko Kikuchi) runs through town without underwear trying to lose her virginity.
Each story reveals characters with communication problems: the American couple cannot talk about the death of the baby or the previous abandonment of the husband; the children have never told their parents about their sister’s incestuous peep shows, the nanny is not only ignorant of the English language, but American laws; the Japanese girl, who in addition to having difficulties communicating with anyone who is not deaf, has a strange and tense relationship with her father.
It takes a long time to connect all the stories (at least 20 minutes could have easily been edited) and the payoff may not be worth the wait for some people. However, the acting is excellent throughout the film (particularly the scenes with the American couple after the shootout and any scenes involving the nanny). This gritty and depressing drama earns its R rating by providing straightforward depictions of violence, nudity, survival, despair, fear, and isolation.
