Babel: Speaking in Tongues

Pitt reaches out and touches someone.(Photo by Murray Close)

Barraza answers the call. (Photo by Eniac Martinez)

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More About

• Guillermo Arriaga
• Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
• Brad Pitt
• Adriana Barraza
• Paul Haggis

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and written by Guillermo Arriaga, Babelis the latest exercise in narrative and temporal collage-making from the duo previously responsible for Amores Perrosand 21 Grams, and this time they’ve dumped a loving spoonful of linguistic confusion into the mix too. Filmed on three continents and in four languages (five, counting sign language), the movie is about communication — or lack thereof — between husbands and wives, parents and children, and nations divided by physical and/or ideological borders. And if you’ve seen either of Iñárritu and Arriaga’s previous collaborations, it will not surprise you to know that, in Babel, all complicit parties pay an extraordinary price for their failure to connect.

The serpentine story line goes something like this: In the Moroccan village of Tazarine, a goat herder buys a foreign-made rifle from a neighbor. The gun has a three-kilometer range and will be good for scaring off jackals, says the seller — note this, it will be important later, says the film. From there, it’s on to San Diego, where a kindly Mexican nanny (Adriana Barraza) cares for her two white charges (Elle Fanning and Nathan Gamble) while preparing to attend her son’s wedding south of the border. Then, it’s back to Morocco, where the parents of the American children are in the midst of a bus trip for Western tourists — less a vacation, we soon learn, than an escape from a recent personal trauma. In a ramshackle outdoor cafe, the woman, Susan (Cate Blanchett), sighs wearily and asks her husband (Brad Pitt), “Richard, why did we come here?” Then, she grabs a soda glass from his hands and violently throws the ice cubes to the ground, shrieking, “You don’t know what kind of water is in there!” Welcome, it would seem, to the Axis of Evil H20. Finally, Babel whisks us to Tokyo, where a recent widower (Kôji Yakusho) struggles to find common ground with his moody, deaf-mute teenage daughter (Rinko Kikuchi) who, for lack of words, uses her blossoming sexuality as her language of choice.

What joins all of these characters is a single shot heard round the world: an errant bullet fired on a whim by the goat herder’s two young boys (Said Tarchani and Boubker Ait El Caid), which pierces the window of the tour bus and Susan’s neck, indefinitely delaying her return to San Diego. That, in turn, puts the nanny in a bind — does she stay with the kids or schlep them with her to the wedding? — which in turn leads to one fatally bad decision and oodles of personal and geopolitical chaos. As for the Tokyo story, which for a long while seems to have no direct connection to the others, it is eventually revealed to be the first link in this escalating chain reaction. Think of it as the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in China, only instead we’re in Japan.

As awards season shifts into high gear, you can expect to hear a lot about how “daring” Babelis in its internationalism and its willingness to let large chunks of its story play out without so much as a single word of English dialogue. And daring I suppose it is, at least for those in Hollywood who believe foreign-language pictures are things to be remade rather than released, and for those moviegoers who rank among the 2/3 of Americans without a valid passport. That’s not entirely a bad thing: The mere presence of Pitt assures that Babelwill be seen by audiences whose only prior encounter with subtitles may have been an episode of Lost. And in its humanistic-bordering-on-patronizing view of its Moroccan characters, the film goes some way towards easing reservations about Middle Easterners that have proliferated in the West since 9/11.

Comparisons to Paul Haggis’ Crash(which was itself influenced by Amores Perros) are inevitable, and the two films share a similarly reductive view of human nature: If it was Haggis’ point that we’re all capable of racism whether we’re in the majority or the minority, it’s Iñárritu and Arriaga’s that we’re all capable of suffering no matter which corner of the world we hail from. This, it would seem, is the true universal language. Yet Babel has an undeniable power, even (or perhaps especially) when it’s at its most contrived and implausible, as when the nanny flees through the night into the Mexican desert, her two frightened companions in tow, after a botched re-entry at the U.S. border. We know by now that Iñárritu and Arriaga’s characters are going to be tried by fire whether it makes dramatic sense or not, but at least they come across as actual human beings and not just pieces in an elaborate sociological jigsaw puzzle.

There are fine performances throughout (though I wouldn’t number Pitt’s among them, even if his mumbly line readings and mannered running of his hands through his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair have already struck some as the makings of ?Oscar gold). Barraza in particular is a marvel, so harrowing as she navigates the sizzling desert sands that you may feel beads of sweat forming on your forehead as you watch her. You may also be reminded that the plight of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. remains one of the most obtrusive elephants in our cultural living room.