"Babel" is the third in a series of films - which started with
Amores Perros and "21 Grams" - from the team of director Alejandro González Iñárritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga. Like its predecessors, "Babel" features multiple intertwined storylines, most of which would make for very interesting films, but which combine to form a difficult, rhythmically-challenged, and largely humorless epic.
We start in a tiny Moroccan village, where a father buys a rifle so that his sons may keep the jackals away. But boys will be boys, and soon they're on top of a mountain seeing how far the bullets can travel. Meanwhile, the American tourists Richard and Susan (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) are vacationing nearby after a family tragedy. They will end up on the wrong bus at the wrong time. Meanwhile, back in Southern California, a Mexican nanny (Adriana Barraza) must attend her son's wedding with her two young charges in tow. And in a fourth, even less-related story which takes place in Tokyo, a young deaf-mute girl, Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), longs to feel love and acceptance.
Even without its biblically flavored title, "Babel" obviously aims to speak to the themes of communication and disconnectedness. But Mr. Arriaga's script goes surprisingly easy on its characters. The kids speak fluent Spanish with their nanny; Richard has his trusty interpreter by his side; and even young deaf-mute Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) always has a pad and paper at the ready. Instead, it falls to Mr. Iñárritu to instill a sense of disorientation via jarring cuts between storylines. Mr. Iñárritu is adept at telling his story visually, sometimes skipping unnecessary subtitles as needed, but all that inter-cutting makes it impossible to create a sense of rhythm in the film.
The cast is uniformly solid. Young Ms. Kikuchi is heart-breaking as Chieko. In the underwritten roles of Richard and Susan, Brad Pitt, looking positively haggard, and Cate Blanchett, wonderful as always, have some truly great moments together. Ms. Barraza, meanwhile, does a fine job steering clear of Mexican stereotypes, while Gael García Bernal, who shows up as her nephew, is not so lucky.
When a filmmaker links stories together, it can either feel gimmicky (
"Lucky Number Slevin" comes to mind) or it can illuminate a greater theme (
"Crash", for example). "Babel" has several great stories to tell, and I would have been happier spending 90 minutes with any one plot instead of jumping back and forth between them all for 140. "Babel" never quite adds up to anything more than the sum of its parts. But some of those parts are unforgettable.
