Four separate groups of strangers on three different continents collide in this multi-stranded drama.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu won the Best Director award at Cannes for this ambitious and intelligent drama about how a single event can send ripples across the whole world. The film also contains messages about misery, love and family (although occasionally these are sometimes - perhaps deliberately - blurred), and uses a series of events that occur around the same time to convey these messages. In a way, Babel is very similar to Paul Haggis's uneasy Oscar-winning picture Crash, where difficult themes are put onto the backs of "token-ordinary-people" to show how universal these themes are.
It's very easy to get cynical about this type of cinema. Films that adopt a "we are all human, lets join hands and unite" message do so at their peril, as it is very easy to end up patronising the audience and simplifying issues that should never be dumbed down. On some levels, Crash felt like it was talking down to its viewers, spoon-feeding them the "real" truths about racism in America. One of Babel's strengths is that it never assumes its audience is stupid, and offers them a cinematic experience that can be interpreted in a number of ways, allowing for differences in opinion. It's also important to note that, even though the film has big things to say, it never forgets to do its job: to entertain. Nearly every scene in the movie is compelling, visually rich, shocking, funny, exciting, vibrant or moving.
The opening of the film sees two poor Moroccan boys playing on the mountains near their home. They fire a gun that their father has received as a gift on the instruction to shoot predators that could be a threat to their animals. But one of the bullets fired by the boys shoots a woman on a tourist coach at the bottom of the mountain. This woman and her husband (played by Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt, respectively) seek refuge in a small dusty village, miles from a hospital, and have to get the local veterinary surgeon to sew up her bullet wound. The film's globe-spanning plot also concerns a deaf girl in Japan and two American children at a Mexican wedding. Links between these characters are slowly realised as the film progresses - some of them not until the closing scenes - but the moment when everything falls into place is tremendously effective.
It's not perfect. Babel has some serious problems buried in its filmic DNA. With its continent-hopping narrative threads, the drama never really gets to settle, and as soon as we have identified or connected with one set of characters, off we fly again to a different part of the world. The casting of Brad Pitt as the frantic husband, desperate to save his wife from bleeding to death, was a surprising but commendable decision as it gives him the chance to play a role less commercially gimmicky than his past efforts. However, Blanchett as the wounded wife does little more than lie on the floor gushing blood. Her talents are wasted, and although Pitt isn't bad, she's twice the actor he'll ever be.
Babel serves as both a sad lament about the breakdown of communication between cultures and as a sentimental drama about human emotion. It has enough to offer for us to forgive its weaknesses, and cinema of this scope and power should be embraced rather than sneered at. It may not offer all the answers, but it certainly raises some important questions.
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Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu won the prize for Best Director at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival for this powerful multi-narrative drama set in Morocco, Mexico and Tokyo. A young American couple, Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett), go to Morocco on holiday to restore their fragile relationship following the death of one of their children. However, they are catapulted into disaster when a rogue gunshot fired by a Moroccan farmer's young son brings Susan to the brink of death. Meanwhile, the couple's other two children have been left at home in San Diego in the care of their housekeeper Amelia (Adriana Barraza), who cannot find anyone to mind the children while she attends her son's wedding across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. She decides to take them with her, a decision that nearly costs all three their lives. In the third storyline, set in Tokyo, a teenage deaf-mute rebel, Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), is reeling after the apparent suicide of her mother. Her attention-seeking behaviour makes her increasingly vulnerable, but can she attract the attention of the person she feels most isolated from: her father? The implications of language, whether unspoken or misunderstood, are the recurring theme in this set of interlocking tales of love, prejudice and the connections between us all.
Please note this is a region 2 DVD and will require a region 2 (Europe) or region Free DVD Player in order to play. An epic tale of human alienation, BABEL draws several disparate yet interconnected storylines that converge in surprising and cataclysmic ways. An accident sparks a chain of events that have global repercussions.
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