Babel

2006, United States
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Screenplay: Guillermo Arriaga
Story: Arriaga and Iñárritu

With this review, I return to my alphabetical journey through Roger Ebert’s Great Movies list. Bring on the B’s!!

Babel is in the same spirit as Paul Haggis’ Crash. Both films deal with disparate cultures and interweaving story lines, and both seek to emphasize basic human similarities rather than differences. Crash may be cheesier than Babel, but I also felt it was a more complete film with a fuller message. That isn’t to say Babel is bad, or even that the difference between the two is significant, but it betrays that Babel’s payoff isn’t quite what I had hoped for.

Drama-wise, there are a number of good elements in this movie. It opens with two boys playing with a high-powered rifle, an interesting dynamic that predictably leads to mischief. Another, particularly strong plot thread takes place in Mexico and builds fluidly from innocent intentions to catastrophic consequences. A desert sequence somewhere near the U.S.-Mexican border is the film’s emotional apex, conveying a true sense of desperation in a situation gone horribly awry. Oddly, I didn’t find the movie’s main plot thread, starring Brad Pitt, to be especially compelling. It moves along well enough but feels a little diluted; at the end of the movie I found I knew surprisingly little about Richard Jones or his wife Susan (Kate Blanchett).

In fact, this is a movie that is pretty good at withholding information. A number of plot threads wither away towards the end, without granting us the satisfaction of a full conclusion. I don’t mind that decision in the abstract, but there’s just too much left unsaid in Babel. Besides the ideas that are just insufficiently explained (the ending to the Japanese storyline has a couple of these), there is not a motivating moral or feeling in the closing scenes. What is the purpose, for example, of bringing the movie full circle when a phone conversation refers to a much earlier scene? Though there is a nice juxtaposition of moods and perspectives, I’m still not cognisant of a more unifying idea, of what has been learned, and I think a film like this really benefits from that kind of higher structure.

Style: 7
I liked Iñárritu’s directing here. He does some interesting camera work in the desert scene, effectively conveying the feel of endlessly placing one foot in front of the other. This is also a visually diverse film, jumping from blue, blurred cityscapes to tan, clear deserts, which keeps the eye interested. Babel won the Academy Award for Best Original Score, but I can’t say I really noticed the music. It seemed like decent guitar-y tunes.

Substance: 7
The Mexico story is the strongest of the four, and does a great job of raising the stakes. The other plot threads are done well enough, but the character struggles are perhaps stretched a little too thin, and they do not end with any kind of unifying, or otherwise highly satisfying, conclusions.

Overall: 7
Babel is clearly a quality film with some very well-done elements. It ended worse than it started, however, because ultimately the story lines really don’t mesh all that well. The greatest forms of art have a structure that is simultaneously hidden and manifest, and Babel doesn’t rise to those elusive levels.