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Brilliantly conceived, superbly directed, and beautifully acted,Babelis inarguably one of the best films of 2006. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu and his co-writer, Guillermo Arriaga (the two also collaborated onAmores Perrosand21 Grams) weave together the disparate strands of their story into a finely hewn fabric by focusing on what appear to be several equally incongruent characters: an American (Brad Pitt) touring Morocco with his wife (Cate Blanchett) become the focus of an international incident also involving a hardscrabble Moroccan farmer (Mustapha Rachidi) struggling to keep his two young sons in line and his family together. A San Diego nanny (Adriana Barraza), her employers absent, makes the disastrous decision to take their kids with her to a wedding in Mexico. And a deaf-mute Japanese teen (the extraordinary Rinko Kikuchi) deals with a relationship with her father (Koji Yakusho) and the world in general that's been upended by the death of her mother. It is perhaps not surprising, or particularly original, that a gun is the device that ties these people together. YetBabelisn't merely about violence and its tragic consequences. It's about communication, and especially the lack of it--both intercultural, raising issues like terrorism and immigration, and intracultural, as basic as husbands talking to their wives and parents understanding their children. Iñárritu's command of his medium, sound and visual alike, is extraordinary; the camera work is by turns kinetic and restrained, the music always well matched to the scenes, the editing deft but not confusing, and the film (which clocks in at a lengthy 143 minutes) is filled with indelible moments. Many of those moments are also pretty stark and grim, and no will claim that all of this leads to a "happy" ending, but there is a sense of reconciliation, perhaps even resolution. "If You Want to be Understood... Listen," goes the tagline. And if you want a movie that will leave you thinking,Babelis it.--Sam Graham
BeyondBabel
Other Interweaving Storylines on DVD
Other DVDs by Director Alejandro González Iñárritu
one of the year's most satisfying pictures Innaritu's films all contain different threads that somehow link together in the end to make a whole.. Not only that.. the seperate threads also contain themes which link the stories together to make a larger statement.. In 'babel' that story is of the inability to communicate.. Each story shows us some situation that went wrong in some way.. but the characters all were victims of not being understood.. 'Babel' is probably Innaritu's best work since 'Ammores Perros' took the international movie scene by storm.. It is a rich beautiful movie - intense, emotional, and visually gorgeous.. Its implications are enormous - it tells us a lot about how delicate our relations with the rest of the world can be.. This along with 'the departed' were the two best films of the year in my opinion.
How does such mediocrity get 7 Academy Nominations? There are so many things wrong with this movie that I find it hard to understand the number of positive reviews. This is mediocrity trying to pass as an enlightened film on how we are all connected and the global consequences of our actions. Every parent in this film was beyond irresponsible and should have had their children taken away from them.
I'm suppose to believe that a well-off American couple deserts their also grieving young children to go to Morocco for "alone time" to recover from the Sudden Infant Death of their youngest child (talk about the me generation)? That this couple would leave their kids alone for weeks with the nanny (an illegal immigrant, day care provider)? That's just one of the many far-fetched steps that are used to force this movie along.
The shooting of Cate Blanchet's character was messed up. Where was the continuity manager for the movie? She was sitting on the driver's side of the bus, yet she was shot by a bullet fired from the opposite side of the bus. However, it is shown as if the bullet comes in her side of the window (this is cartoon physics where the bullet magically goes around the object). From the angle that the kid's fired the rifle, the bullet would have gone in the front or the front side opposite the driver and oppostie where Cate was sitting. Based on where the bullet came in the bus, the local police should have been looking at the hillside area on the left side of the bus, but they still managed to find the shell casings high on a hill in a large landscape of desert, in just a short time. This can only happen in a movie. She was hurt so badly that her husband, Brad Pitt, (in yet another one-two note acting job) tried to keep the bus in the small town rather than try to reach a hospital. Yet she was well enough to talk and move around some before the helicopter finally showed up many hours after she could have been at the hospital. Also, was it because they were Americans that the shooting was tagged immediately as a terrorist event? Would that have been the case if the Australians or Germans on the bus had been shot? This whole setup reeked of "the ugly American".
If one believes the premise of this movie that all the characters are tied together by the rifle, then Chieko's mother, who committed suicide by shooting herself, probably did so with the ill-fated rifle because of incest between the father and daughter (implied in the final scenes of the movie). The father abandon's his daughter in her grief and goes to Morocco to shoot big-game (do they have any in Morocco) and leaves the rifle behind as a gift to his guide precipitating the events that bring all the families together. The guide sells the rifle to his friend for what seems like an extreme amount of money considering the circumstances in which they live.
Once the kids have the rifle, they use it for what are the only believable sections of the movie. They are told to shoot jackals to protect the family's most important possession, the goat herd. Instead, being kids, they start shooting at rocks etc and aim at the bus because they don't believe the bullets can go that far. Then they hide the gun and act like typical kids who have screwed up.
In the mean time, even with the mother having been shot and the father calling and telling the nanny (Amelia) to stay with the kids, she decides to take them to Mexico for her son's wedding in the car driven by her clearly irresponsible nephew. Instead of staying after the wedding for a reasonable time and letting the nephew sober up, they all get back in the car and end up in trouble at the border. Amelia then makes every imaginable mistake, putting herself and the kids in life threatening situations, only to end up deported and no longer able to see the kids she claims (strongly) to the border patrol, that she loves.
This movie was an endless stream of improbable and impossible events meant to garner sympathy from the audience. It failed. Gael Garcia Bernal and Cate Blanchett, both of whom are outstanding actors, were wasted; anyone could have played their parts.
If you want a movie that shows how actions have global consequences see "Syriana". If you want a movie that makes a statement, see "Thank You For Smoking". If you want an Indie film that will make you think, see anything by Charlie Kaufmann.Arrogant, Manipulative, Grandiose This film really pissed me off. The creators seem to take sadistic glee in utilizing a narrative to torture their characters, and then try to fool the audience into thinking this a profound thing. In short, they play God, and a rather adolescent God at that. It's a shame, as they are a very talented couple of guys, but they are REALLY full of themselves. The cast is excellent, except for Blanchette and Pitt, who should have stayed home.
