It's hard to say exactly what's on director Alejandro Gozales Innaritu's mind in his new film, Babel, but it's safe to assume it's something big. The film's very title aims almost too high for comfort, explicitly evoking that biblical hot spot where haughty humans reached for the stars and paid the price by tumbling into a multi-lingual morass. Consequently, even before a single frame unfolds, Babel can't help reminding us that language, for all its perks and pleasures, remains an instant metaphor for one person's reality becoming something barely understandable to someone else.
That's maybe the main thing that this overly elaborate film wants to impress upon us: The frustrations of a world where everybody's talkin' at each other but no one hears a word they're saying. Many tongues are spoken and many stories interwoven in Babel, but, like those blind men feeling up the elephant, each of the movie's characters has only the foggiest notion of the big picture of which they're part.
Babel continues the patented blend of interlocking narratives and scrambled time frames that Innaritu and screenwriting partner Guillermo Arriaga previously dished out in Amores Perros and 21 Grams, and their new movie is in many ways their most ambitious project yet. There's no denying that Babel is more grandly proportioned than anything these filmmakers have previously attempted, and there are bigger, sexier stars this time as well. But the agenda, writ large through a series of multicultural fragments, is artier than ever.
The crowds will surely come opening weekend to catch "the new Brad Pitt movie," but it'll be interesting to see what they make of Babel, much of it puzzling and Pitt-less. The confusion is all but guaranteed to set in right from the start, beginning with an opening 15-minute stretch featuring a couple of Moroccan goat herders hanging out in the desert speaking in subtitled Arabic.
As always, Innaritu and Arriaga make us feel a lot like those aforementioned blind men with the elephant, hinting at broader possibilities while keeping us in the dark for as long as possible. The filmmakers take their sweet time allowing the fog to lift, as the connections between the separate story strands begin to reveal themselves (sometimes slowly, sometimes in a blinding flash): a deglamorized Pitt (graying and bearded) plays stressed-out husband to Cate Blanchett, two moderately ugly Americans touring Morocco; a Mexican housekeeper in Southern California transports her two young Anglo charges across the border for a family wedding; a deaf-mute teenager in Tokyo deals badly with anger management issues and her out-of-control hormones; a pair of Arab kids fooling around with a new rifle suddenly find themselves embroiled in an international incident that brings out the worst in everyone.
What, you might well ask, do these characters and stories have to do with one another? As Innaritu and Arriaga would have it, everything and nothing.
Although many of the film's characters aren't even aware of each other's existence, their lives are all linked by a series of coincidences, small flukes rendered cosmic in the unbearable randomness of being. In Babel's version of chaos theory, a butterfly flaps its wings somewhere, and a Japanese businessman on vacation gives his hunting rifle to a Moroccan guide, eventually resulting in the guide's youngster accidentally putting a bullet in Brad Pitt's wife. This in turn causes Pitt's and Blanchette's housekeeper, on the other side of the world, to risk missing her son's wedding unless she brings the couple's kids with her to Mexico, where beautiful and dangerous things await. And so on, and so on.
The filmmakers' obsession with patterns of chance is nothing new, but in Babel their reach sometimes exceeds their grasp; simply put, we too often feel the movie straining to supply the connections necessary for making sense of the chaos. Like M. Night Shyamalan on a bad day (or, worse, Paul Haggis furiously struggling to link up his characters in Crash), Inaritu allows his new film to depend a little too heavily on a string of those damned Sixth Sense-ish O. Henry twists. These are revelations largely of convenience, clearly intended to intensify the movie's dramatic focus, but that more often wind up making Babel come off as a bit glib and even gimmicky.
And when all else fails, you can be sure that Innaritu — a gifted filmmaker, for sure, but one prone to naively confusing disaster with profundity — has something cataclysmically awful up his sleeve for virtually every last one of his troubled characters.
There are some painfully potent, small moments here — primarily in the sequences involving the deaf Japanese teenager (beautifully played by Rinko Kikuchi) — but the movie puts most of its eggs in a considerably more ornate basket, the better to communicate its Grand Design and Hugely Important (but not always clearly articulated) themes.
As the movie's puzzle pieces come together, Babel seems to be saying a thing or two about an awful lot of subjects — about the imprecise nature of truth, about children damaged by the absence of parents, about the horrors of arbitrary violence, and, mostly, about the dynamics that emerge between those with power and those without it (which basically means the relationship between rich, white Americans and the rest of the world). All of these Hugely Important themes are touched upon, although how they fit together remains a bit sketchy even after the movie's final image fades to black.
Still, Babel is bound and determined to pull off its cosmic hat trick, and, to a degree, it succeeds. Even with all the metaphysical doodling and contrived re-arranging of structure, the film gives us slabs of emotion that ring raw and true, with an English Patient-esque mix of ingenious editing, seductive cinematography and solid performances that go a long way toward winning us over.
The movie's real trump card, however, is its attention to the purely sensual byproducts of all its globetrotting tale spinning. At its best, Babel plays like a character-driven version of one of those multi-culti Koyaanisqatsi travelogues, reveling in human beings soaking up the contrasting sights and sounds of a dizzyingly eclectic world: a lively Mexican border town, a herd of goats lazing in the desert twilight, a packed, hyper-sophisticated hot spot in the center of Tokyo.
Innaritu bends over backwards connecting the dots and covering all the serious, intellectual bases, but it's when the director stops trying so hard and simply shows us people, looking at the world and enjoying themselves, that Babel is allowed to breathe. That's when this enormously ambitious film finally becomes something greater than the sum of its parts.
This article appears in Nov 8-14, 2006.