Reviewed by Tim Wong

IGNORING for a moment the tedium of Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga’s insistence on doing things in threes, Babel is a bold, throbbing minor miracle, and their strongest work as a collaboration to date. Removed from the frizzle of Amores Perros and the hysteria of 21 Grams, this intercontinental triptych bursts forth with a towering energy, replete with loud, tactile imagery and a nerve-wracking precariousness. The director/writer duo take their fascination with grand human tragedy and globalise it, mastering the scale of consequence between the film’s quartet of colliding stories, each intimate, unflinching, at times crushing. Its macro-narrative is also something to behold, densely populated with Big Themes and topical waypoints: rich white tourists gallivanting naively in the Middle East; the hyper-connectivity of technology as an alienating force; the spectre of George W. Bush’s proposed 700-mile fence between Mexico and the US. Not only does Babel cross that border several times, leaving its characters stranded and at the mercy of a harsh immigration policy, but it ushers in a new insurgence of Mexican filmmakers to the mainstream.


Like Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, Iñárritu’s Babel certainly demands your attention. It begins tensely, planting a seed of destruction in the hands of a young boy in a remote region of Morocco, whose target practice soon turns to a passing tourist bus. The bullet’s victim (Cate Blanchett) is rushed to a neighbouring village, where her husband (Brad Pitt) scrambles to find help. Back in America, the couple’s children are upended without their permission to a Mexican wedding under the care of their nanny (Adriana Barraza) and her reckless nephew (Gael García Bernal), while in Japan, a detached father (Koji Yakusho) struggles to connect with his promiscuous deaf-mute daughter (Rinko Kikuchi), providing a remote link to the shooting in the Middle East as the donor of the fatal weapon. Iñárritu wields his four perspectives with typical dexterity and prowess, presiding over events with a disquieting intervention, and crafting strident transitions between their chaotic overlap and epic continental shift. The film’s scope may be overambitious and self-congratulatory, but it sticks, its imagery at times threatening to burn a hole through the screen: Barraza frightened, desperate, abandoned in the middle of the desert; Kikuchi naked, teetering on a ledge, Tokyo’s bottomless void below; even Pitt’s tears, an emotional outpouring triggered by a phone call to his son back home.

But what to make of Babel’s plea to “listen”? Lacking the abrasive unease and bravura of Code Unknown, Iñárritu’s film is an apprentice piece to Michael Haneke’s masterwork. Both consider the malfunction of communication in modern society through multiple characters, timeframes and locations brought together by violence; both proffer the conflict of race, class, and a contemporary despair in their world view; both posit deafness as a metaphor for the breakdown in human relations. And yet whereas Haneke’s film is at once severe, open-ended, even hopeful with the right amount of ambivalence, Babel seems at times manipulated and too closely laid out, brandishing its biblical parable like a bright neon sign. As a film incommunicado, it’s at its most resonate and intuitive in Japanese: its Tokyo narrative so tenuously linked that it could’ve easily stood alone as a taut and perceptive chapter on collective malaise. Though the extraordinary Rinko Kikuchi brings much needed pathos to the table, fearless in her portrayal of a sexually precocious teen, her distress also derives ostensibly from latter century movements in Japanese Cinema: where films began to resemble a new society lacking in communication, crippled by the erosion of human contact. In its emotionally distant father figure, techno-ravaged landscape, overwhelming urban environment, and endemic Japanese austerity, Babel illustrates best of all the isolation and estrangement of young people caught in the slipstream of accelerated times, recalling in spirit a wave of Japanese youth movies, from Typhoon Club, to All About Lily Chou-Chou.

Babel may falter in its articulation of ill communication elsewhere, but as a blazoned dramatic feature with moments of profundity and euphoria, it is strong cinema indeed. If the film has a certain been-there-done-that feel about it, with Stephen Mirrione editing, Rodrigo Prieto shooting, and Gustavo Santaolalla scoring, it’s only because it’s now refined. If a bearded Brad Pitt in khakis slumming it in the third world conjures up unwanted images of him a motorcycle with Angelina Jolie in Ho Chi Minh City, you only need to look to his left for the chameleon talents of Cate Blanchett. If Mexicans crossing the border are the territory of Fast Food Nation and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada already, know that this time around, all does not end with a Happy Meal. Most of all, if Babel come awards time prompts a sense of deja vu, rest assured it’s everything that Paul Haggis’ grade school Oscar travesty wasn’t. What we’ve learnt from the mire of Crash, Sandra Bullock and Luda-fucking-cris, is that there are more shades to this world than black and white. Thank God Iñárritu understands.

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