The emotional exhaustion of watching this film is a measure of its expert director, writer, and cast.
When the descendants of Noah presumed
to build a ladder to heaven, God, angered at their arrogance, scattered them
around the planet there to live forever in multilingual confusion. “Babel”
touches down in Morocco, America, Mexico, and Japan, landing for a short period
in the lives of families struggling with chaos that has overwhelmed them. If
some of the connections are thin, the big one, the Bible’s chaos of language and
culture, is the movie’s driving force. The emotional exhaustion of watching this
story is a measure of its expert director, writer, and cast.
Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez
Inarritu and written by Guillermo Arriaga, “Babel” begins in the relentless
desolation of the Moroccan mountains. A father has given his small sons a rifle
with instructions to protect the family’s goat herd from harm. The boy decides
to test the range of the gun on a passing tourist bus where his bullet pierces
the neck of Susan (Cate Blanchett) who sits next to her husband Richard (Brad
Pitt).
As the film jumps to Tokyo, we watch
as teenaged Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), a deaf teenager filled with anger after her
mother’s death, inflicts her sullen rage on both her father and her basketball
team. As the movie switches powerfully from sound to silence to show us Chicko’s
world, we understand both her fury and her destiny as an outsider even in the
world of high privilege that she inhabits.
In America, Amelia, a Mexican taking
care of Susan and Richard’s children, receives Richard’s call from Morocco. They
won’t be coming home soon; there has been a shooting; Amelia must not cross the
border to attend her son’s wedding in Mexico; but she does. And she takes the
children with her. As each mile passes, Amelia (played beautifully by Adriana
Barraza) sinks deeper into guilt for what she has done, she fears their return
journey with good reason.
Susan and Richard, stranded far from
medical help and lost without the American infrastructure, may lose even the
support of the impatient tourists who are their fellow passengers. They in
Morocco, Amelia in Mexico and California, Chieko in Tokyo – all are isolated and
helpless. Overtaken by sudden trouble, they must deal with misfortune alone.
There is no support for any of them in alien cultures and languages. Only the
thin history of the rifle connects them in actuality. On an emotional level,
they share terror.
The forsaken landscape of the desert,
the dusty Mexican wedding tent, the perfection of the Tokyo apartment – these
are the wildly different landscapes for the misery that unfolds not in a
generalized way but at very specific moments in the lives of the characters.
During the time we know them, they are thrown from security into fear. Whether
it is rape in Tokyo, a shooting in Morocco or being lost in the southeastern
desert, the scattered cultures and languages bring deep ravaging, fear to
everyone in this powerful film – the biblical Babel indeed.
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