REVIEW: Babel

I finally got around to seeing Babel this long weekend. It was the last of the Best Picture nominees that I saw and this may have influenced my impressions of the film. I am generally a fan of the director Alejandro González Iñárritu's work. I loved his films Amores Perros and 21 Grams, which were also both written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed and produced by González Iñárritu.

Babel has the now-familiar structure of seemingly unrelated stories following a particular theme with characters whose relatedness the audience has to figure out during the course of the film.

The four stories are: a member of a bereaved American couple (played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett)visiting Morocco gets hit by a stray bullet, two young Moroccan brothers who try to alleviate their goat tending boredom by firing a long range rifle at a faraway tourist bus, a deaf-mute Japanese teenaged girl (played by Best Supporting Actress nominee Rinko Kicuchi) who is estranged from her recently widowed father and desperately seeking intimate (male) attention from strangers in Tokyo and two very young white children who live in San Diego go on a road trip with their Mexican nanny/housekeeper (played by Best Supporting Actress nominee Adriana Barraza) to her son's wedding across the border in Tijuana with her irresponsible nephew (played by hottie and González Iñárritu favorite Gael Garcia Bernal) at the wheel.

As you may have noticed, one of these stories is not like the other: the Japanese teen angst story. The other arcs follow the travails of innocents who are put into mortal peril due to circumstances beyond their control (a stray bullet through the tour bus window hits Cate Blanchett's character, the two boys are caught up in an anti-terrorist militaristic response by the investigating Moroccan authorities and the two kids and caregiver are abandoned in the deadly Mexican desert due to some questionable behavior by Garcia Bernal's character. I am pretty sure the fourth story was included so that the director and writer could include Japanese sign-language as a mode of communication displayed in the film, enhancing it's multicultural bona fides by supplementing the more prosaic languages of (American) English, Spanish, Japanese and Arabic which had already been included.

The score by Gustavo Santaolalla (Best Score Oscar for Brokeback Mountain) is quite interesting and inventive with a sonic palette which includes Mexican hip-hop, Japanese disco, Moroccan vocal pieces as well as his own signature evocative string arrangements. I particularly mention the music because there are many significant scenes of the film without dialogue where the score communicates the emotion of the moment.

All in all, though it's hard to say what Babel means in the end. I believe the inclusion of the fourth story dilutes the narrative impact of the film. I sort of agree with what one wag said on public radio: "Babel should get an award for most directing in a film" (and that's not really a compliment).

GRADE: B+.