Babel - Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Four stories, each intense and tragic, all connected in some way to relate a singular narrative. Many films are told this way – director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu often constructs his films in this way – but few are as worthy of celebration as Babel. Taking its name from the Tower of Babel, which in the Book of Genesis results in the people of the world being scattered and ceasing to speak the same language, the film explores the confusion of cultures and the hostility inherent therein. It is a film that is far from perfect, but it can never be accused of not taking its subject seriously.

The first story involves two brothers in Morocco, Ahmed (Said Tarchini) and Yussef (Boubker Ait El Caid). Ahmed is the elder, but Yussef is the one favoured by their father, who admires the younger boy’s superior skills with the new riffle he has bought for shooting jackals. The boys go up into the mountains with their goats and practice shooting, leading eventually to a wager that Yussef can’t hit a bus passing on the road below. This is, obviously, a dangerous game but in their childlike way they fail to recognize that their actions could have consequences for other people, that their personal narrative is not isolated but connected to the narratives of others. The reality of this fact doesn’t hit them until after Yussef pulls the trigger and the bus slowly comes to a stop. Realizing the enormity of what they’ve done the boys flee but they quickly learn that they can’t hide from what they’ve done.

The second story centers on Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett) a married couple trying desperately to reconnect with each other by taking a trip to Morocco. Susan is the victim of the brothers’ foolish game, ending up with a bullet in her neck. Hours away from the nearest hospital, Richard is forced to seek medical help from a local village while waiting for the U.S. Embassy to send someone to take care of the situation. Complications arise when the media immediately brands the accident as a terrorist attack, prompting the Moroccan government to deny the allegation and creating a lot of political red tape that ultimately delays help from getting to an ailing Susan.

The third story involves Richard and Susan’s housekeeper Amelia (Adriana Barraza), who has been charged with looking after their two young children until Susan’s sister can arrive to take over. When the sister is delayed, Amelia has to scramble to find someone to look after the children so that she can go to Mexico to attend her son’s wedding. When no one can be found, she decides to bring the children with her, which leads to complications when she and her nephew (Gael Garcia Bernal) try to bring them back across the border.

In the fourth story Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), a Japanese deaf-mute, struggles to cope with the way her disability alienates her from the world around her and with her intense feelings about her mother’s death. This plotline does not fit easily with the others; it is in fact connected in such a feeble way that it could easily be lifted out without affecting the other three stories. However, at the same time, it’s also the strongest of the plotlines and Cheiko is the film’s most resonant character. In a few scenes during which the film literally gets inside Cheiko’s head, showing us the world from her perspective, it reaches a particularly high plateau of meaning. We see the world as silent, confusing, and from a distance, and we gain a better understanding of her behaviour, of her seemingly desperate need to connect with anyone in any way possible. By exposing herself in the way that she does to others, she’s asking to be accepted, to be included in the community that surrounds but still eludes her.

The other three plotlines have their moments of power, but somehow fail to leave as deep an impression as the fourth. It is perhaps because as a viewer you find yourself putting the pieces together, connecting the events of those other three stories, which are so tightly knit, in a linear fashion whereas the Japan chapter is so far removed from the others that you aren’t focused on the connecting lines, but on the story itself. The acting is solid in all four parts but, aside from that fourth part, the characters rarely seem like more than products of their current misery.

Babel is ultimately a world story, rather than a story of individuals, not simply because it takes place in multiple corners of the globe but because it examines the impact that origin has on the way that crises play out. When you consider the way that each of the characters ends up and the way that their individual narratives play out, it’s difficult to escape a certain truth. Richard, Susan and Cheiko, characters from wealthy, developed nations, are characterized as being innocents caught up in the consequences of other people’s decisions. Their stories, ultimately, end happily because they have done nothing wrong. Contrast that to the fates of Yussef, Ahmed and Amelia, all from impoverished nations. None of them are villains, just people who make short-sighted decisions without the luxury of existing in a place of implicit privilege. The deck is already stacked against them before they’ve even done anything so when something goes awry, they can’t simply bounce back from it and carry on; their lives are irrevocably altered and they lose whatever ground they had gained prior to the disastrous event. The real value of Babel as a film lies in the way that it explores this larger scale story about the imbalance between nations and peoples, addressing the subject in an intense way without ever crossing the line into being overbearing. It is a flawed film, certainly, but it is nevertheless a meaningful document about the state of the world in the first decade of the 21st century.

Watch a trailer for the movie here: