MOVIE OF THE MOMENT: BABEL

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Babel, the apparent conclusion of a bleak stylistic trilogy the director began, in collaboration with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada), with Amores Perros and continued in 21 Grams, is a movie made by a man who isn’t driven by the exchange of ideas, or the interweaving of ideas, or even the collision of ideas. With Babel, Inarritu is satisfied with raw emotional reaction, even if it’s merely simple discomfort or dread. Just knowing that that something awful (or at least humiliating) is coming down the pipe for each character is apparently enough. Babel plays, with its four stories that aren’t interwoven so much as they are pasted together with rhythm-free pacing and affectlesness, as if it were edited by a somnabulistic channel surfer looking not for thematic resonance in the way one story leads into another, but for relief from the realization that once each story reveals its hook it will literally go nowhere, and not so fast.

Like Crash (a far more interesting movie, even if it is also a far worse movie—perhaps because it is a far worse movie), Babel takes its cue from the billboard obviousness of its biblical title and proposes itself as a grandiloquent metaphor for our modern disassociation and inability to communicate. In all seriousness, the movie is no more profound than a simple statement that our languages and cultures not only divide us but hamper our ability to understand each other, whether we are face to face or trying, with increasing futility, to meaningfully communicate using technology— cell phones, e-mail, TV news. In the one story where clashing cultures cannot be held culpable for this societal detachment, Inarritu and Arriaga feel no shame in making their protagonist, a Japanese teenager (Rinko Kikuchi) lost in anguish over the suicide of her mother and acting out her anger in a series of increasingly desperate sexual situations, a deaf-mute. That crushing sound you just heard is a sledgehammer metaphor landing on top of the viewer’s head. Babel is a movie made by a filmmaker seized by one simple idea who then, by devising narrative strategies designed to keep the viewer off-balance, gooses his film into the appearance of profoundity.

It’s not a new approach—Nicolas Roeg, as one example, built a career out of editorial gamesmanship, shuffling chronology and point of view, often to devastating effect (The Man Who Fell to Earth) and sometimes not (Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession, Track 29). But Roeg also paid attention to the details of visual cues, graphic continuity, images that drew subtle references to other images, from within the film and from without. He had the eye of a deranged imp, and when he was firing on all cylinders the viewer was usually too enthralled to notice, especially in the case of The Man Who Feel to Earth, that had the story been told in a more straightforward manner its seams, or even the true simplicity of its narrative, might have been more apparent and perhaps less moving.

Babel tricks up its narrative(s) too, with the same sort of sleight-of-hand that its director used to headache-inducing effect in 21 Grams. But the new movie isn’t quite so much a confusing scramble— each story is laid out in fairly routine get-from-point-A-to-point-C-by-way-of-point-B storytelling. The only time the stories backtrack on one another is in their initial setups—the Moroccan boys out hunting jackals with a rifle who shoot at a bus, with apparently serious results, are left behind so we can see the married couple (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett), on vacation trying to recharge the batteries of their relationship in the shadow of a child’s death, argue, board that same bus and wait to be dealt their next cruel hand. Soon we’re introduced to the nanny (Adrianna Barazza) with whom this vacationing couple (who really should have considered a seaside resort rather than a dusty, demanding bus tour of Morocco) have left their two children. She receives a phone call from a man who says “she’s in the hospital now” and to not worry, over which the nanny expresses great relief. She’s so relieved, in fact, that when she can’t find anyone to take care of her employers' kids so that she might go to her son’s wedding just over the border into Mexico, she actually thinks it might work out well if she just brings them along for the ride. With her nervous, tic-ridden, clearly unstable nephew (Gael Garcia Bernal) behind the wheel to deliver them into Tijuana, what could happen, right? Then it’s back and forth as these three stories play bumper cars with each other for a while, until the seemingly unrelated segment with the Japanese girl is introduced.

Outside of its obvious thematical connection to Inarritu’s sprawling position paper, it does take a while for the director and screenwriter to tease out just what literal connection this girl’s story could possibly have with the rest of the film. When they do, it’s certainly a bit of a stretch—the girl’s father (Koji Yakusho), who she obviously holds responsible for her mother’s suicide, is a globetrotting hunter who gave the rifle, which will be given to the boys and will eventually fire the bullet that perforates Blanchett’s neck, to a guide he met on a Moroccan hunting trip. This is the tenuous connection upon which the movie builds its chaos theory of catastrophe. Were there an overriding visual intelligence at work in Babel, it might not have been enough to bolster such a fanciful bummer of a fractured fairy tale, but it might have at least made the movie’s plumbing less transparent, or provided some poetry to use as the glue that connects the various sequences. But Inarritu is comfortable leaving the audience to do that kind of heavy lifting for him. Babel is bereft of the kind of rich connective tissue that made The Godfather Part II’s leaps of time and storytelling momentum glorious acts of collusion between the director and the audience. Instead, Inarritu settles for familiar nausea-inducing camerawork that signals the in-your-face verisimilitude he values far more than poetry, yet provides no sense of what is supposed to hold this narrative network of medicinal pessimism together-- Babel is meant to be good for you, and to hurt as well, and a lot of people seem to be fine with taking the director’s word for what it is that allegedly makes for the flesh and blood of this movie’s worldview.

In talking about the movie to someone who thinks far more highly of it than I do, I questioned whether there is any room in Inarritu’s directorial vision, suffused as it is with the pursuit of shopworn universal truths about our pitiless existence, for a simple moment of pleasure. Those Moroccan boys are seen gamboling about on the hills above the road that will eventually deliver their fates to them, laughing, arms stretched out, allowing themselves to be held up by the strong winds that buffet the surrounding narrows—but only in flashback, after their story has taken its inevitable, fatal turn. And that Mexican wedding has plenty of tequila and dancing to ranchera music to counterbalance Bernal’s getting big laughs by decapitating a hen in front of the shocked children in his aunt’s care. Why, even the aunt herself finds a stolen moment of romance with an old flame. But all the frivolity plays out under a gathering cloud of doom that we know (otherwise, why would be sitting here watching it?) will soon rain degradation and horror upon the woman and these kids. (Be happy now, for this too shall pass.) Pitt and Blanchett (two movie stars whose very presence adds a lopsided sense of entitlement to the ingredients of Inarritu’s bitter pill) rekindle their dormant lust for each other on the dirt floor of a Moroccan hut—if only he didn’t have to use one hand to keep the poor woman from bleeding to death. And as good as she is in the role, Kikuchi’s character is allowed only agony and desperation—she may be giggling when she flashes her pantiless pubes at some green schoolboys, but we know she’s miserable because the director won’t let us forget it for a moment.

And Kikuchi is memorable in the role. She brings a weight to the girl’s suffering that is entirely separate from any sympathy we might have for her because of her inability to hear. In fact, the jabbing, staccato rhythms in which she deals out sign language to her father are the furthest thing from comforting communication between father and daughter. Each twist and flick of finger and fist is a dart thrown at him that hits exactly the intended target-- his tormented soul. Kikuchi, who is neither deaf nor mute, captures with admirable precision the body language of both a teenage girl (she is 25) and a deaf teenage girl—the mixture of halting insecurity and playfullness with those agonizing moments of sexual playacting are affecting because they feel true and seem original at the same time. It is here, in fact, in the film’s acting, where those elusive moments of pleasure are to be found—they’re in Blanchett’s face when Pitt refuses to argue with her (about what we don’t yet know); in the howls of despair rippling from Barazza in the personage of that nanny, brought low and stumbling through the Sonora Desert, as she tries to speak reasonably to a border patrolman and direct him back to the two children she’s left to bake in the sun; and in the face of the father of those two boys in Morocco, a loving man who can’t contain his anger when he’s told of what they’ve done, or the nauseating realization that because of it the lives of his boys, and most likely his own, are all but over.

Babel is well-acted throughout. Perhaps because the presence of marquee names like Pitt and Blanchett are reduced to but a fraction of the screen time, they’re unable to wield enough Method-induced mopey snot-and-tears anguish to (literally) bring the house down the way Sean Penn and Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro and Melissa Leo were allowed to in 21 Grams. And perhaps because Inarritu has given lesser-known perfomers like Barazza and Kikuchi a chance to operate in a lower key, the movie doesn’t feel oppressive as far as the actors, even the ones in smaller roles, are concerned. (Bernal, however, is wasted in a part that never finds resolution, one that might as well have him wearing a placard that reads “plot device”—in Spanish, of course.) But the unfortunate truth is, without Pitt and Blanchett it’s unlikely that Babel would be getting half the attention it is—their glowing movie-star visages, writhing in agony on that dirt floor or screaming in righteous outrage at uncomprehending Moroccan officials or boorish fellow bus passengers, lends marketplace credence to audiences eager to be impressed and Academy members lusting after big important themes to go alongside tabloid-familiar name brands.

Inarritu has said that in conceiving the individual narrative strands to be intercut, he was looking to avoid them coming off as simple short stories. But if he and Arriaga were willing and/or able to devote any real sensitivity to the development of the stories, a simple narrative could have been more than enough, and the unpleasant sensation of being wrenched out of one story at inopportune, random moments and being herded to the next could have been avoided. If anything, the emotional power of Babel is continually defused rather than accentuated by this faux-complex format, but despite the director’s Herculean efforts, the banality almost always shines through. I was continually reminded not only of the lack of meat on the bones of any one of the narrative strands, but also how the film’s infrastructure serves to elongate those moments of dread, where the fates of Blanchett, Barazza, her two preadolescent charges and the boys huddling in fear amongst those Moroccan hills are left for us to marinate in until the film lurches back and doles out more information. It’s a pretty unseemly way of going about creating audience tension, dangling the possible deaths of innocent children in front of an audience, then either rubbing our noses in the bloody awfulness of it all or resolving the situation with a couple of lines of dialogue in order to get on to the business of completing another character’s absolute downfall and humiliation.

Personally, I have had it with big-time directors (and small-minded ones) who amp up their big statements by holding the threat (and delivery) of violence or death upon kids over an audience in order to make them cower and be happy to swallow the dubious medicine their movies are pedding. And it makes me depressed that yet another big movie, geared for Oscar glory, has to stoop to such methods. It’s all about tricking up the message, adding whipsaw camera movement and editing to what is essentially a lugubrious high-concept lecture. Our inability to communicate and understand each other in this modern age (to say nothing of our willingness to accept an incredible amount of horseshit and criminal behavior originating from our governments) is indeed cause for great and profound sadness. But I think Babel, to some degree, banks on just that damming of the flow of understanding. How else to explain that such a potentially rich theme could be so thinly realized and yet still be proclaimed as a masterpiece?