>>REVIEW
BABEL
STARRING: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael Garcia Bernal
DIRECTED BY: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Opens Friday, November 10
Check listings
Academy Award-nominated director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga’s film Babel, the followup to the duo’s acclaimed 21 Grams, is a story of tragic circumstances and miscommunication. The film interweaves the relationship of four families to an international chain reaction sparked by the accidental shooting of an American tourist in the Moroccan desert.
Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett play a married couple travelling in North Africa and coming to terms with a personal tragedy. When in what’s now becoming standard Gonzalez Inarritu fare (guess what?) tragedy strikes again as a couple of goat-herding kids accidentally fire a high-powered rifle into the bus the couple is on, an act that is seen internationally to be one of terrorism. The film depicts the instance’s impact on the lives of four families, moving narrative between Mexico, Morocco and Japan, exploring the barriers of borders and of communication – thus the title’s reference to the Tower of Babel, the Biblical explanation for the origin of humanity’s disconnection of language.
For these reasons Babel is already being described as "this year’s Crash." However this is not a completely accurate comparison. Whereas Crash examined the impact of cross-cultural prejudices on the decisions and lives of its characters, the communication breakdown in Babel occurs within the relationships and families seen, and within each culture represented. The film depicts a series of God-awful-bad decisions by some of the film’s characters, heaping tragedy ludicrously higher and higher to set up a somewhat schmaltzy and flat ending.
This heartache and exploration of emotion is what gave Gonzalez Inarritu’s 21 Grams its power, however with Babel it seems as if the director is substituting needlessly overwrought emotion for just telling the viewer a good story. Each plotline would make a great stand-alone film, but when interwoven and related to each other the tragedy starts to wear thin. One wonders, given the different individual events that crisscross and overlap with the main story, why each one has, at its core, some terrible occurrence or heartache? Just once I’d love to see a jump-cut to one of the other plotlines to find a couple of dudes hanging out in a basement playing X-Box and drinking Slurpees, or some happy family buying groceries – something plain and human to lend some needed balance, catharsis and contrast.
With filming done by Rodrigo Prieto, who shot Brokeback Mountain, Babel’s best quality by far is its collage of cinematography. Shot in four countries and over three continents, the film’s landscapes and imagery are visually fantastic. However, given that this is easily Gonzalez Inarritu’s most Hollywood movie to date, perhaps a great director is handcuffed by the need for films of this nature to spell everything out for the audience. There is a reluctance to let the camera and imagery do more storytelling and, as a result, the film lacks an important element of subtlety. The film will stay with you, but the effect is that there isn’t a chance to let each story’s consequences sink in. The viewer struggles to absorb and distil Babel’s messaging on a deeper or more personal level. |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.