2006: Babel

Babel (2006, Iñarritu) 7/10

In his famous publication The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, film critic Andrew Sarris remarked that the career of legendary Hollywood director William Wyler was "inflating without expanding." Building his name via a series of sophisticated melodramas, Wyler's trademark refinement was abruptly replaced by the swollen pomposity of films such as Ben Hur. In 2006, one could utilize Sarris' summarization of Wyler's career to describe the present stagnation of gifted Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Iñárritu's latest film, the Academy Award-nominated Babel is a globalized meditation on human nature, interconnected relationships and cross-border miscommunication. Telling four intertwined stories, Babel is a film as consciously self-important in contemporary cinema as Wyler's Ben Hur was over four decades prior.

The first story centers on two young adolescents in rural Morocco who are given a rifle by the father to ward off jackals threatening his livestock. Desperate to ascertain the weapon's range, the boys fire upon a passing tourbus in the valley below. Beginning as schoolboy naivety and carelessnes, the boys' gunplay turns adolescent stupidity into a fiery international conflict. Amongst the group of European and American tourists in the bus are feuding couple Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett), whose marriage is crumbling due to Susan's bouts with depression.

Back in the United States, the couple's children are being watched over by Amelia (Adriana Barraza): a Mexican illegal immigrant who wishes to return to her homeland to see her son's wedding. The effects of a tragic accident half the world away squander these hopes: resulting in Amelia taking action into her own hands by taking her employers' young children alongside her nephew (Gael Garcia Bernal) into Mexico.

The film's final story involves a deaf-mute Japanese schoolgirl named Cheiko (Rinko Kikuchi). At a loss after her mother's suicide, Cheiko is unable to vent her frustration to the world and her emotionally incompetent father. Thus, she begins to resort to crude tactics such as exposing herself to her male peers and romantic infatuations in order to try and obtain the love and affection she desperately yearns for.

The overall thematic approach to Babel can be summarized in a powerful scene in which Barraza's Amelia scours the Mojave desert searching for help. Amongst the sand and brush, she is a mere speck in a physically imposing world in which little details can effectively alter many lives. One cannot discount Iñárritu's ambition in creating Babel: a film aiming to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the modern world and the individual acts of selfishness that corrupt it. Yet, in its illusory grandeur, Babel loses its potency in an overlong pastiche of aesthetic ideas and contextual themes.

At the core of these problems is the film's intertwined episodic narrative structure. Operating with differing time and spatial constructs, Babel overcomplicates itself. By placing the scenes involving Pitt and Blanchett in a scattered construction, Iñárritu aims to provide an everlasting emotional power to the film's finale. Yet this power is betrayed by the unnecessary complexity of the film's editing and the weakness of the film's connected parables.

As independent narratives the four stories in the film work quite nicely in documenting ideas of familial and social betrayal, pain and destruction. But linked together in a series of frayed connections, much of this emotional velocity quickly dissipates. The ties binding the Japanese sequence- easily the film's most visually interesting and emotive piece-feel false, contrived and hurried. Similarly, the reasons behind the characters pain appear more self-inflicted than part of a grand social malaise. Each of the characters makes a decision in the film, which leads to their anguish: it is their responses to this anguish, which are Babel's greatest asset.

In arguably the best performance in a supporting role in 2006, Rinko Kikuchi creates a character filled with the thematic qualities of misinterpretation and failed communication Iñárittu wants to impress upon his audience. But the emotional seriousness of Babel is never captured with as much delicacy as in this small story in Tokyo. Instead, the strictness of the emotion forced upon the audience, while nowhere near as clumsy and over-the-top as in Paul Haggis' Crash, still feels rigid despite some excellent performances by Kikuchi and Cate Blanchett in particular.

The film's key thematic concepts are easily noticeable. Miscommunication causes American officials to believe the two Moroccan boys and their father are terrorists and that Amelia is a kidnapper; while on a familial level Cheiko is unable to confer her feelings to her father; while Richard and Susan struggle to converse with one another. Yet, from these themes we see the devastation, anguish and pain. Thus Iñárritu's thesis is simplistic in that the failure to connect breeds suffering and isolation: exemplified in Cheiko's alienation from others and the association with foreignness felt by Richard in a rural Moroccan village. Yet the fulfillment of Iñárritu's statement could be more solidified through an alternative approach.

In attempting to create such as an artistic statement, Iñárittu's film barrages its objectives in a manner that is visually stunning, but creatively awry. Certainly, there are possibilities within the film's narrative structure to tell the story as it is, but the outline and direction employed in Babel sabotages much of the film's final weight; inflating a picture, whose intentions require it to be more grounded and less repetitous. One could even argue the picture oversteps its limits by at least twenty minutes to half an hour.

Beginning with his 2000 debut Amores Perros, Iñárritu has fashioned a visually distinctive filmography exploring themes of human interaction and miscommunication in his subsequent projects: 2003's 21 Grams, 2006's Babel and a short film for the 2002 September 11th omnibus 11'09'01. Working alongside writing partner Guillermo Arriaga, Iñárritu has emerged as one of world cinema's brightest prospects: enticing some of cinema's biggest contemporary talents including Sean Penn, Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael Garcia Bernal to appear in his films.

But while filming his latest film Babel, the relationship between Iñárritu and Arriaga disintegrated over artistic ownership of their Academy Award nominated globetrotting triptych: fracturing the possibilities for future films. Yet, one of the critical rebukes to Iñárritu and Arriaga's métier has been the lack of contextual progression in their collaborations. Despite being one of world cinema's most visually innovative artists, Iñárritu has remained fixated in an invariable unchanging narrative and thematic structural framework.

Certainly this type of creative restraint is not uncommon among contemporary cinema's auteurs: M. Night Shyamalan for instance has operated within a constant sub-Hitchcockian framework. Yet, what separates an accomplished director from an influential artist is the ability to expand and develop one's craft and art. In the 1970's Martin Scorsese was renowed for his stylish update of the gangster genre. Desperate to expand his repetoire, Scorsese tackled other areas such as an ill-fated Noirish musical ( New York, New York), surrealist comedy (After Hours) and a 19th century literary adaptation (Age Of Innocence). While Scorsese's experiments were not always successful, they enabled the American director to cultivate his cinematic tastes and abilities.

Filled with promise, Babel demonstrates that Alejandro González Iñárritu is arguably one of the most visually assured directors on the planet. Yet, in order to remain fresh, Iñárritu needs to attempt to step out of his aesthetic comfort zone and engage in riskier, small-scale projects. British directors Michael Winterbottom and Danny Boyle have used the freedom to experiment within low-budget projects to cultivate their aesthetic tastes: an approach to filmmaking which offers opportunities to expand one's creative cache, rather than inflate it.

*Babel is available on Paramount Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque