World of Hurt

Tragedy besets American tourist Richard (Brad Pitt) in the Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu film, Babel. (Murray Close/Paramount Classics)

The films Amores Perros and 21 Grams, from the union of director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga, seem driven by a perpetual-motion machine designed for non-stop heart-wrenching; there are more emotional climaxes in each of these films than in a month of Dr. Phils. This is fine, but it’s a strange way to make movies: the feeling comes first; story, character, motivation — all that stuff is secondary.

And so Babel, the latest from the pair, is undeniably powerful, even overwhelming, though at the same time a little light and intellectually ungrounded. But being a film writer, I spend far too many hours in theatres feeling as emotionally inert as a root vegetable, so I love to be moved, even when the film’s mental landscape is suspiciously arid.

As per the chaos implied by the title, Babel is a swirling, chronologically skipping creation that takes place on several continents in several languages. Two young brothers, Yussef (Boubker Ait El Caid) and Ahmed (Said Tarchani), live in the mountains of Morocco in palpable poverty. With no books or signs of education anywhere, they spend their days herding goats in the mountains and selling animal skins; the boys’ futures seem utterly pre-determined. One day, sent to shoot jackals with their father’s new hunting rifle, they accidentally hit the window of a tour bus winding through the road far below. Susan (Cate Blanchett), a sphincter-clenched American tourist who uses her own cutlery in foreign restaurants, takes the bullet in the neck and her husband, Richard (Brad Pitt), struggles to save her on the dusty floor of a Berber hut.

Back in the couple’s tastefully wealthy home in San Diego, Mexican nanny Amelia (Adriana Barraza), takes their blonde children across the border for her son’s wedding. The kids are ecstatic partygoers, pinwheel-eyed at the raucous band and multi-tiered cake. But something sinister lingers: Amelia’s nephew, Santiago (Gael Garcia Bernal, in a torqued performance), drinks too much and twirls a gun on his finger, as if pointing toward some encroaching violence. The image of the gun takes the story to Tokyo where Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), a deaf teenaged girl, is lashing out over her mother’s suicide with astonishing displays of sexuality: grabbing her dentist’s hand during a checkup and pulling it southward; removing her underwear and flashing teenaged boys.

Deaf-mute Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) grapples with her emerging sexuality and her mother's suicide. (Tsutomu Umezawa/Paramount Classics)

Tired yet? There’s a whole lotta movie in Babel, and the sheer volume is exhausting at times. Inarritu seems to operate under the principle that movies as beautiful to behold as his own require almost no narrative (I tend to think narrative is a nice bonus). The closest thing to a unifying story in Babel is the idea of the butterfly effect of globalization: one person’s thoughtless action can cause tragic ripples around the globe. We are so linked now, and yet not linked at all, ever struggling to find that common tongue denied us since Babel.

Fragmented, disconnected, rafter-packed with actors, depressing: something smells Crash-y! And yet last year’s Oscar winner, Crash, with its spelled-out lecturing, was too gaggingly righteous to cause much feeling beyond smugness. The infinitely superior Babel struggles with the vastness of its subject, too, though it flails in an entirely different way: the film might be using too much of a whisper to say some of the same things Crash shouted.

The Moroccan incident is seized upon by the global media as an act of terrorism, amplifying the stakes for everyone involved. When the father of the Moroccan boys, Abdullah (Mustapha Rachidi), finds out his children are implicated in an international incident, an avalanche of feelings fall across his face until settling into fear. Babel is at its most potent when it narrows the broad topic of disconnection to parents and children: this film will gut anyone who has a child or has been close to one. It is a primal kind of terror to imagine that your children are crossing borders without your knowledge, let alone while you are bleeding out in another foreign country. “Home” is a fragile place in Babel, and around the world, it is crumbling.

Inarritu draws wonderful performances from his cast. Pitt’s marquee fame falls to the wayside; he looks worn, desperate. But the actors who are “unknowns,” to use an ironic tag in this context, are revelatory. Kikuchi is a perfectly furious teenager, hormones radiating like Pigpen’s dust plume. Barraza shoulders the burden of playing a stereotype — the good immigrant — with grace.

Eventually, though, Inarritu’s subtle touch becomes a liability. What are we to make of these expendable children, this wounded planet? Just showing us the wound doesn’t feel like enough. Because the film is so crowded, there is no time to really hear the stories of these characters, to question their motivations or examine the complications of their lives; the film is its own kind of babble. Richard and Susan are in Morocco because one of their children died, but this startling fact is a mere footnote, another layer of pain to skim across, just like terrorism, or illegal immigration. The pieces are gorgeous, but they don’t make a whole movie experience. Perhaps in his next film, Inarritu— so gifted — will still himself, and stay with one idea to its end. I walked away from Babel ragged, my emotions worked over, but my mind disturbingly calm.

Babel opens Nov. 3 in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, and in other major cities across Canada on Nov. 10.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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