director
Alejandro González Iñárritu
screenwriter
Guillermo Arriaga
story by
Guillermo
Arriaga
Alejandro González Iñárritu
producers
Steve Golin
Alejandro González Iñárritu
Jon Kilik
cinematographer
Rodrigo Prieto
music
Gustavo Santaolalla
editors
Douglas Crise
Stephen Mirrione
cast
Brad Pitt (Richard)
Cate Blanchett (Susan)
Gael García Bernal (Santiago)
Rinko Kikuchi (Chieko)
Mohamed Akhzam (Anwar)
Boubker Ait El Caid (Yussef)
Said Tarchani (Ahmed)
Mustapha Rachidi (Abdullah)
Adriana Barraza (Amelia)
Elle Fanning (Debbie)
Nathan Gamble (Mike)
Emilio Echevarría (Emilio)
Clifton Collins Jr. (Officer)
Michael Pena (John - Border Patrol)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 142m
u.s.
release: 10/27/06
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other alejandro
gonzález iñárritu films
reviewed on this website:
- amores
perros
- 21 grams
see also:
- high
fidelity
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A group of intertwined stories
told in non-linear fashion, designed to make a larger point about
one of the Great Themes of Life: the Mexican director Alejandro
González Iñárritu has built a nice career
on just such films. 2000's Amores
Perros employed the structure beautifully, 2003's 21 Grams far less so. Now there is
Babel, which lashes together four stories of brutally
broken humanity to illustrate that, in this world, what we have
here is a failure to communicate. "Listen," the film's
ads admonish. I did. What I heard was a good deal of sound and
fury signifying very little, and the few moments of insight or
power are parcelled out over two hours and twenty-two minutes.
I loved Amores Perros and still consider González
Iñárritu one of the more excitingly ambitious filmmakers
at large, but having done the same narrative dance three times,
he should really move on.
I'll see if I can synopsize
this thing coherently. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett play a tormented
married couple on vacation in Morocco. Out of nowhere, a bullet
strikes the tour bus they're in and hits Blanchett in the neck.
The bullet comes from the rifle of a Moroccan man whose two young
sons are testing the distance of the bullets; unfortunately,
they pick the tour bus as a target, not really expecting to hit
it. Pitt and Blanchett's own two kids have been left in the care
of a Mexican maid (Adriana Barraza) who needs to attend her son's
wedding back home across the border and totes the kids along
with her (though not before exhausting all other options). Seemingly
incongruously, we also go to Japan and meet a deaf-mute high-school
girl (Rinko Kikuchi) who responds to her mother's suicide with
the worst case of Japanese sexual acting-out since In the
Realm of the Senses.
Some of this is forcefully
handled -- the undramatic bullet impact and Blanchett's frighteningly
underplayed immediate response; the Japanese girl standing naked
before a baffled detective; the maid hysterical, stranded in
the desert in red dress and heels -- and it's all well-acted.
But the impact is scattershot; the structure lacks the crackling
simultaneity of Amores Perros, wherein the disparate characters
seemed linked by something more mystical than mere plot contrivance.
We felt the connections there; in Babel we intellectually
connect the dots, at the expense of emotional coherence. Like
Martin Scorsese's The Departed
and Brian De Palma's The Black
Dahlia, this is yet another master filmmaker's
empty exercise treading familiar ground.
Bizarrely (coming from a Mexican
director), the Mexican storyline shows humanity at its most desperately
stupid. Gael García Bernal, who rose to international
fame after Amores Perros, drops by here as the
maid's irresponsible nephew, who shoots off a gun at the wedding,
gets drunk, and attempts to drive her and the kids back across
the border in the middle of the night. What follows stretches
credibility so far that we can feel this storyline missing its
presumed point (the agonies of immigration) by a mile. We never
do find out what happens to Bernal's character, either. González
Iñárritu may simply be familiar enough with Mexican
culture to feel comfortable portraying the few Mexican characters
as fools, but it has the unfortunate effect of adding to the
white characters' burden.
Babel may be intended as the conclusion of a thematic
trilogy for González Iñárritu and his writing
partner Guillermo Arriaga. People have compared it to 2005's
Oscar-winner Crash, but, taken
together with the other two González Iñárritu
films, it's really more like Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue
-- moral tales about normal people in abnormal situations.
Amores Perros had that sort of depth effortlessly, but
Babel strains for it and falls depressingly short. I can
applaud the effort and the intention, but the actual thing on
the screen is a lumbering, stitched-together mess. Since González
Iñárritu has now finished this trilogy, I look
forward to what he does next.
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