Theatrical Review of Babel

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"Babel", the latest film from "21 Grams" and "Amores Perros" director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, is really four stories related by one simple object: a gun. Husband and wife Richard and Susan (Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett) are on a getaway in Morocco when a bullet hits her in the shoulder while riding in a bus. In a land where he does not speak the language, Richard tries to get help for his dying wife. Meanwhile, the young child who fired the "shot heard around the world" is forced to come of age quicker than any child should. Back in California, Richard and Susan's children make a trek into Mexico with their nanny Amelia (Adriana Barraza) for a family wedding. However, on the way back home, they find themselves on the run from border security. And in Japan, a deaf-mute girl struggles with being an outcast in a hearing world. Her connection to the events making headlines around the word? Her father provided the gun to the Moroccans in the first place.

The storytelling device of weaving vastly different stories together using a singular object or a coincidence is nothing new. Last year's Best Picture Oscar winner "Crash" is the most recent example. But the difference between this movie and that award winner is very simple: all of the stories in "Crash" developed the main throughline in some way. The movie was about racism and intolerance each of the various vignettes spun the story a little differently. In "Babel", the main throughline is the inability of people to communicate (a Bible story, according to the trailer). In the Japanese story, a high school girl (Cheriko) is so starved for attention and love after the death of her mother that she will literally go to any length to feel something…anything. She flashes her genitals to a boy at a restaurant she strips in an attempt to seduce a cop she even forces the dentist to touch her when she is going commando. The only person she doesn't communicate her need to is, obviously, the one she needs to communicate with the most: her father.

It's not that these people are unable to communicate with each other they don't take the time to do so in any meaningful way. Richard, when Susan has been shot and is bleeding, yells like a madman with blood on his hands at passing cars. He would have been far more effective in getting help quicker for Susan if he had brought the tour guide with him-a man who can speak the language. But he doesn't. Granted, it would be very difficult if not impossible to maintain a cool head in a situation like this one, but some sort of logical and rationality has to prevail. Even when we're at our worst, some part of us knows that simple fact.

And that's one of the biggest problems with "Babel": the characters don't want to connect with each other. The overriding reason for different languages in every corner of the world was to protect the heavens from the imperfect creatures. If they can't communicate, then they couldn't work together to build a bridge or ladder big enough to reach the sky. However, with these modern people as well as those ancient ones, any barrier can broken (especially the language barrier) if enough time is taken and patience exhibited to construct a useable base of knowledge.

Cheriko and her father speak the same language: sign language. It is obvious he has taken the time to learn how to speak with his daughter, but she doesn't want anything to do with him…which is a realistic attitude for a teenager her age. However, Cheriko knows she needs something she doesn't have in her life and can't ask her father for it. Granted, she is looking for a level of familiarity her father can't give her (she is chided for being a virgin early in the film), but that is beside the point. Like Richard, Cheriko refuses to slow down enough to make her feelings known.

The third story in "Babel", that of nanny Amelia and her nephew Santiago, is perhaps the most compelling out of the four. And that is in no small part to the superb acting of Adriana Barraza. While she is stuck in California with the kids, she doesn't really have an opportunity to shine. Her acting chops come into play when she and the children are stranded in the desert. The pure desperation on her face, coupled with running makeup and disheveled clothes, and the way she vainly tries to convince the border patrol the kids are alone in the desert is just about as powerful a sequence as there is in "Babel". Her story, and that of Santiago, isn't as much as not wanting to communicate with a fellow human being than it is about Santiago not communicating the truth. Amelia, a Mexican woman, is clearly not any relation to the white children, but Santiago believes the patrol officer will buy the lie.

That is another one of the twists on communication "Babel" takes. In addition to having the tools to communicate efficiently (patience and mutual understanding), the characters demonstrate the need for trust as a third piece of establishing a dialogue. It's unclear why Santiago doesn't do exactly what the border patrol asks him to. The worst that is going to happen is Richard is going to be called in Morocco to confirm Amelia is the caretaker for the children. She may get into some trouble for the trip, but ultimately no one would be stranded in the desert.

Lastly, a side story to Richard and Susan takes place in the desert involving the children who fired the shots toward the tour bus. They withhold crucial information from their father regarding their role in what turns out to be an international crisis. It turns out the youngest son has been spying on his sister while she changes, which his older brother keeps to himself. And therein lies the fourth piece of communication: the extreme consequence of lying. In Amelia's case, no one ends up paying the ultimate price for a lie as far as the audience knows. Here, a family is ruined.

"Babel" isn't a bad movie taken on its own terms, the film is a meditation on something people who speak the same language take for granted. Where it fails is in its promise. The trailers for it build almost a mythic quality about the story. Yes, it references the people of the world speaking different languages as a deterrent to them becoming too powerful. But it doesn't accurately portray what this film is about. In "Babel", the parameters of communication are examined along with what allows people to communicate with each other.

At times, "Babel" feels weighted down with its own self-importance and self-awareness. It's as if the movie as an entity knows the message it is trying to convey and is burdened by that fact. The best comparison I can make is the glut of 9/11 tele-movies that take such a somber tone in regards to the events of the day it is unbearably heavy. At one point "Babel" was on the radar as a sure Oscar favorite. That's no longer the case, though nominations in some acting categories (especially for Barraza) wouldn't be out of the question.

Communication is a problem we all deal with, whether it be between two English speaking people or citizens of China and France. "Babel" nobly tries to say something, ironically, about communication. Somewhere in the translation, it fails. But it doesn't do so in a spectacular fashion. The film doesn't quite reach the heights it aims for or the premise promises. "Babel", on the scale of 1 to 10, ranks as a 6. Not an uplifting 142 minutes, but well produced and well acted with an often compelling story.

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