Babel

In recent years, there has been a Mexican invasion happening in Hollywood and Babel is the newest movie from the Mexican writer/director team that started this invasion.

Like their previous two films Amores Perros and 21 Grams, Babel follows a non-chronological, non-linear and multi-episode storytelling format. Compared with the other two movies, Babel may be screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s most ambitious project to date. The story goes across four continents and the movie contains four different languages. Chicago Tribune critic Michael Wilmington said it “is a film about the chaos of misunderstanding that often afflicts the world and how it can plunge us into confusion and tragedy”; Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly called it “a theme of global miscommunication and dislocation”. However, to me, it is really a movie about our innate prejudice against others who are different from us, our isolation from our children, our unwillingness to communicate with each other, and further on, as symbolized in the Japan episode, our inability to communicate. In the Morocco episode, the whole family has to work hard to maintain a basic living standard. The parents are too busy simply putting food on the table to care about what their children are up to. In America, the couple (played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) is engaged in their own emotional turmoil and pretty much leaves their kids to be cared for by their Mexican nanny. In Japan, a widowed father (played by Koji Yakusho) is caught up in his work and also hindered by his own culture that does not easily show outward emotions. He doesn’t fully understand his daughter’s anguish and is clueless about how to help her. In Mexico, a loving mother spends most of her time caring for other people’s children instead of her own so that she could support her family.

Arriaga’s script is simultaneously loose and tightly connected. At the beginning of the movie, there are many small details that seem to be left there for no specific purpose, but they are all picked up nicely as the story progresses. He sets up his characters’ fears innocently and later forces them to confront those fears. For example, Blanchett’s character Susan is nervous about the sanitary conditions in Morocco, but when she is injured, she is horrified to see a Moroccan doctor burn a needle over fire to sanitize it before stitching her wound with it; Susan’s daughter is scared of darkness, but when she is left with her nanny and her brother in a Mexican desert at night, she has no other choice but to spend the night in a vast dark unknown. Inarritu and his editors juxtapose images from different story lines to make a smooth transition from one story to another. Dripping blood from a headless chicken at a Mexican wedding quickly changes into Susan’s bloody shirt; one character on a stretcher becomes another one in an ambulance being transferred to a hospital. Inarritu is also a master at showing people’s daily lives, especially those of his fellow Mexicans. His scenes of the Mexican wedding are exuberant with quick hand-held camera movements and just intoxicating for the audience. The Japanese segment may be the weakest link in this movie. Arriaga’s choice of making the daughter deaf-mute is overly symbolic and the story stretches the boundary of plausibility. At the end, he even borrows some ideas from Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. The daughter gives a young sympathetic detective a note that we never get to read. It does not feel as natural as when Scarlett Johansson whispers into Bill Murray’s ears in Coppola’s movie. The actress who plays the daughter constantly reminds me of the ghosts in the Japanese horror film The Grudge.

Unfortunately, the international stars in the cast do not leave strong impressions in my mind after the movie. Pitt, channeling George Clooney in this movie, purposefully makes himself look older and more haggard, but he essentially has only a few facial expressions in his repertoire. Blanchett spends most of her screen time lying down and the movie is a mere exercise for her to constantly express physical and mental agony. My favorite Japanese actor Yakusho is also given too little to do. The Japanese segment almost completely concentrates on the deaf-mute daughter and it only has Yakusho at the beginning and the end. The most memorable performances belong to all the actors in Moroccan storyline and Adriana Barraza who plays Amelia, the Mexican nanny. They are so real that it is hard to separate them from the characters.

In Babel, Arriaga and Inarritu also expose Americans’ self-entitlement and superiority over other nations. When there is a crisis, we expect everyone to bend over backwards for us, to accommodate our needs and put our problems ahead of all else. However, when dealing with other people, we tend to assume the worst of them and do not even attempt to listen to them and understand their situations. In our way of pursuing a happy ending for ourselves, we have ignored all those tragedies happening elsewhere in the world.