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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Babel: Communication breakdown
Thursday 02 November @ 10:21:47 |
 BY PAUL BACHLEITNER
The holy grail for mid-decade filmmakers seems to be the construction of a truly insightful multicultural drama. Such efforts have yielded the varying successes of “Syriana,” “Crash” and “The Constant Gardner.” But “Babel,” opening in Twin Cities theaters this week, comes the closest yet to achieving it.
“Babel” is the third film produced through the collaboration of Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and his screenwriting partner Guillermo Arriaga. Their two prior films, “Amores Perros” and “21 Grams,” displayed a penchant for multiple narrative structures complex enough to beguile the Academy into three Oscar nominations, but were a little too opaque to earn any victories.
The holy grail for mid-decade filmmakers seems to be the construction of a truly insightful multicultural drama. Such efforts have yielded the varying successes of “Syriana,” “Crash” and “The Constant Gardner.” But “Babel,” opening in Twin Cities theaters this week, comes the closest yet to achieving it.
“Babel” is the third film produced through the collaboration of Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and his screenwriting partner Guillermo Arriaga. Their two prior films, “Amores Perros” and “21 Grams,” displayed a penchant for multiple narrative structures complex enough to beguile the Academy into three Oscar nominations, but were a little too opaque to earn any victories.
The narrative of “Babel” is no less complex, but Inarritu and Arriaga have here achieved a simplicity and subtlety that brings a greater degree of focus to the human drama. The result may not be the holy grail, but it’s a film that sweeps past cultural iconographies to gain insight into the lives of the individuals embedded within them.
This deep focus is apparent from the first moments of “Babel,” which are filled with the sound of wind on rocks and the crunch of a man’s footsteps traversing a mountain to a remote village in the deserts of Morocco. Haggling voices replace the clatter of elements as the man arrives at a small compound and sells a rifle to a goat herder and his family for some cash and a goat. The mundane economics here subtly contrast the simplicity of the people with the web of intrigue the gun will introduce to their lives.
In a critical lapse of judgment borne of necessity, the goat herder entrusts the gun to his two boys to defend the family herd against poaching jackals as he attends to business elsewhere. But the new gun’s powerful allure entices the boys to test the vendor’s claim that the gun’s range is a remarkable three kilometers. The younger, feistier brother, Yusef, whom the film unfortunately characterizes as a little hoodlum who spies on his naked sister, sees a tour bus winding through the mountains and claims with adolescent bravado that he can hit it. His shot seems to miss, but when the bus stops the two realize in horror that the target wasn’t like a tin can they’d set up for practice but a real bus carrying real humans.
 If “Babel” conforms to any genre, it’s tragedy and not suspense. Riding the bus are Richard and Susan, an American husband and wife played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, who foolishly believed a trip to another continent might resolve the marital strife resulting from the sudden death of their youngest child. The bullet rips almost silently into the flesh between Susan’s neck and shoulder, but Richard doesn’t notice until a few seconds later when she slumps forward bleeding.
The ensuing bedlam is as personal as Richard’s attempts to stop a car for help and the complaints of the waylaid passengers about the heat outside the bus. Inarritu and Arriaga evince their genius in the oblique ways they make broader statements about cross-cultural and interpersonal relations. Looking closely we see that this is not any old bus, but a big expensive Mercedes tour bus. The concerns of its bloated white Western passengers about terrorists stalking the mountain passes are legitimate given the gunshot, but also recognizable as an irrational fear of Muslims given the audience’s knowledge that the shooter was a bored kid firing without malice.
The nature of such misunderstandings provides the film’s true backbone, as Inarritu and Arriaga use the gun to provide an otherwise thin connection between four narratives that span three continents. It’s one of several risks the filmmakers negotiate mostly with masterful skill.
The gunshot’s impact diffuses as it spreads beyond the immediate storylines of the Moroccan goat herders and the American couple. The film jumps a continent to follow the couple’s two American children and their Mexican housekeeper (with a small but enjoyable appearance by “Amores Perros” star Gael Garcia-Bernal) and jumps across yet another continent to observe a Japanese father and daughter, a more precarious link that isn’t apparent until midway through the film.
Inarritu and Arriaga craft each narrative as a story so compelling unto itself that the emotional connection between the four narratives (the goat herder’s sons, the American couple, their Mexican housekeeper and the Japanese family) carry the film until more substantial plot connections appear. This decision risks the film’s coherence, but can be justified for aesthetic reasons. Language may separate humans from one another, but pathos can connect them.
The film proves this point again and again without naming it. Although the marketing people chose to include a voice-over with the previews that cites the biblical story of Babel, the film artfully excludes any such authorial intrusions. The four narratives include six spoken languages and the hand gestures of sign language to demonstrate the point.
The film may be too subtle to support all the emotional and intellectual weight of its sprawling narrative. But how can you not love, in this day and age, a film confident enough to reference the specter of American foreign policy only indirectly through a picture of Bush and Cheney at a border patrol stop, or the silliness of ravenous press headlines that assume any act of violence against Westerners is an act of terrorism. ||
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