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Trailer for "Babel"

Before the preview of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel I attended began, the audience was treated to one of those on-screen celebrity-quote-and-quiz features devised by marketing firms to distract people from fretting about the time spent waiting. Brad Pitt, one of the movie’s stars, was cited as having said, “I’ll take wisdom over youth any day.”

Pitt has managed to generate a lot of recent entertainment-press coverage of his humanitarian activities around the world, from Africa to post-Katrina New Orleans. Perhaps his participation in Babel is part of this new gravitas. The director and his screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga certainly seem to regard their film with some gravity, beginning, of course, with the scripturally lofty title. We’re at a considerable remove here from such Pitt vehicles as Troy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Ocean’s Eleven. Babel presents itself as addressing humankind’s alienation and the fragility of social existence, and of life, itself.

The Mexican-born Iñárritu attempts to develop this theme in four interlinked stories, each involving the parent-child relationship. In a makeshift outdoor café in Morocco’s back country, an American couple (Pitt and Cate Blanchett) sit in the shadow of some unspecified mutual emotional separation and sorrow, unable to even agree on the safety of using the local ice in their soft drinks.

Then they board a tour bus and head off into the vast, rocky-hilled desert, and, it briefly seems, novelist Paul Bowles’ territory. But their dispirited journey is terrifyingly interrupted when a gunshot pierces a bus window and strikes her. The shot was fired by one of two very young brothers, Berber shepherds, test-firing a new rifle with childish indifference to the consequences.

Back home in San Diego, Amelia (Adriana Barraza), the Mexican nanny of the couple’s two children, receives a phone message from the husband telling her she must stay with her charges instead of crossing the border to go to her son’s wedding. Instead, she takes the kids with her into Mexico, a stress-driven decision that leads to calamitous consequences.

And in Tokyo, a pretty 16-year-old deaf girl (Rinko Kikuchi) allows her grief at her mother’s suicide to combine with a burgeoning sensuality, impelling her to reckless, desperate behavior. And her sad-faced businessman father is found to be inadvertently involved in the life-threatening events unfolding in North Africa.

Babel shifts back and forth between settings and story lines, sometimes with jarring abruptness, varying pacing and tone as it goes. Iñárritu is impressively adept at constructing scenes and establishing milieux, and his actors’ work has increasing impact, sometimes with telling quietness. (Barraza and Kikuchi are especially memorable.) Babel conveys a virtually unmistakable sense of sincerity. Though it includes instances of violence, Iñárritu’s approach is never exploitive; melodrama isn’t part of his agenda here.

But what he and Arriaga deliver, finally, is soaringly vague and banal. Babel tries to give people’s communication failures a simultaneous global scope and personal pathos, but it just doesn’t have the means to dramatize this meta-theme. It succeeds only in fits and starts, in occasionally striking, even devastating, individual moments. (It may or may not be related to the filmmakers’ Mexican origins, but a couple of scenes involving Amelia and bureaucratically brutal US immigration officers are pointed and obviously anger-fueled, as well as consonant with that service’s nasty history.)

Babel isn’t nearly as coherent or compelling as it’s clearly intended to be. We’re left with too much arbitrary, simplistic plotting, rather than a provocative interweaving of narrative elements. The film is said to have been conceived as the last in a trilogy, along with Iñárritu’s two previous efforts, Amores Perros and 21 Grams, but focusing on this fact is likely to yield more insight into the director than into his latest film.

He and Arriaga are also said to have had a falling out over who should receive the most credit for the film’s ideas and script. Perhaps a break, however personally distressing, would benefit his work. He has the skills and gifts to produce better, more effective films.