Babel is, in many ways, the completion of a trilogy of films that Inarritu has made with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga that use the same fractured narrative to suggest the interconnectedness of people. But the first two, Amoros Perros and 21 Grams, lack the scope of this latest entry, which better illustrates the theme and allows the story to hinge less on melodrama and more on a few quiet moments of humanity.

It cuts around between four interconnected stories. In Morroco, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchette play Richard and Susan, an American couple on vacation, trying to repair their marriage after the death of their youngest child. At the same time, a young Morrocan boy named Yusef (played extremely well by Boubker Ait El Caid) and his brother are given a gun by their father to protect the family's herd of goats. But boys will be boys, and pretty soon they're taking practice shots at things to see how far the gun will shoot, finally taking a shot at a passing bus, which hits and seriously wounds Susan. Later we learn that the gun came to Yussef's father from a visiting Japanese hunter, Yasujiro (Koji Yakusho), who we meet in Hong Kong with his deaf/mute daughter, Chieko (a riveting Rinko Kikuchi). And in San Diego, we find Richard and Susan's two other children, Debbie and Mike (Elle Fanning- Dakota's younger sister- and Nathan Gamble) being cared for by their Mexican nanny, Amelia (Adriana Barraza) while waiting for word on Susan.

That's a lot of storylines to take in and keep straight, I know, but Guillermo Arriaga nearly invented this kind of disjointed story telling, and the script does a fantastic job of introducing us to all of these characters and revealing their connections and back stories in a way that feels totally natural and not at all forced. And once we have all these pieces in place, we follow them on what is almost entirely a downward trajectory. For 130 of its 142 minute runtime, tragedy looms over all four of these families, and it is only in the last ten minutes that the characters, and the audience, find some small cause for hope.

And while that makes the movie kind of a downer, for the most part, I appreciate a film that doesn't coddle the audience's emotions. Inirratu doesn't want to make us feel good about ourselves and the state of the world. Rather, I think, he wants us to realize that our words and our actions have consequences far beyond what we can ever really imagine. It says a lot about his perspective on the world that what we find at the center of this cultural spiderweb is a gun. Now you have to swallow some improbable coincidences to make the conceit work, but if you go with it, I think you'll find that Inirratu and Arriaga are on the verge of something profound here.

Please note that I say 'on the verge of', because A.O. Scott is right that these stories and ideas never really coalesce into something concrete. Instead, the movie dances around our connections to other people, whether they are family or foreigners, whether they can't understand you or don't have a voice with which to respond. But I dig thematic ambiguities in a movie if they're well delivered, and it seems to me that the conversations viewers will have with others and with themselves is more the point than the conclusions those conversations will come to.

Posted in Awards Shows , Industry , Moviegasm , Newsgasm by Sutter Cane at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Last Comment: Alison on Nov 24, 2007 10:12 PM.