Movie Review: Babel

Babel is the third film made by the team of director Alejandro González Iñárritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga. Their previous collaborations were Amores Perros and 21 Grams and if you've seen either of those films, you know what to expect from Babel.

The film shows four interconnected stories. First, two Moroccon boys, out herding goats, recklessly shoot a new rifle at an oncoming bus. In another, Richard and Susan Jones (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) are a married couple on vacation to get over a tramatic event in their lives and save their marriage. They are on a tourist bus in Morocco when Susan is mysteriously shot. They try to get her to a hospital but they are in the middle of nowhere, in a small villiage getting care in a hut while waiting for a way to a hospital. In the third story, Amelia is a mexican nanny taking care of the Jones' children in southern California. Her son is getting married in Mexico and she decides to take them with her over the border. The fouth story is less directly related but is about Chieko, a deaf mute Japanese teenage girl.

As in his previous films, I found all the stories interesting and assume that the stories are connected thematically and not merely as a plot device. However I have a hard time finding a theme that really connects all four. There's the don't do stupid things theme, which works great for don't shoot at buses or take someone else's children across a border but doesn't do as well for don't get hit by a random bullet while taking a bus ride. There's the communicate better theme hinted by the title and that's ok for a troubled teen and a troubled marriage but not so good for others. Maybe it's just the fact that each of the 4 stories are in different languages.

I thought my inability to find this theme was my own shortcoming, but the group I saw it with had a similar problem as did A. O. Scott in the New York Times so I'm in good company.I think others tried too hard finding a theme when they tried "Kafkaesque tragedies about individuals swallowed up by the bureaucratic machinery of nationhood." and "he burrows deep into the existential loneliness of each character to create a kaleidoscope of cumulative human sadness and grief over the state of the world."

I liked Babel. I found it engaging and pretty easy to follow, for such an involved story, that's good filmmaking. The acting is universally strong and there are a lot of emotionally charged scenes. A few stories left me guessing as to the outcome all the way to the ending, and usually guessing wrong. I liked all the pieces, I even got all the pieces, I'm just not sure I got the whole, or that there was a whole to get.