Babel Review: Life Needs Translation

The biblical story of Babel takes up a handful of verses in the 11th chapter of Genesis, and it illustrates, among other things, the terrible consequences of unchecked ambition. As punishment for trying to build a tower that would reach the heavens, the human race was scattered over the face of the earth in a state of confusion — divided, dislocated and unable to communicate. More or less as we find ourselves today.

It tells four distinct stories, disclosing bit by bit the chronology and causality that link them and making much of the linguistic, cultural and geographical distances among the characters. The movie travels — often by means of jarringly abrupt cuts and shifts of tone — from the barren mountains of Morocco, where the dominant sound is howling wind, to fluorescent Tokyo, where the natural world has been almost entirely supplanted by a technological environment, to the anxious border between the United States and Mexico. Each place has its own aural and visual palette. The languages used by the astonishingly diverse cast include Spanish, Berber, Japanese, sign language and English. The misunderstandings multiply accordingly, though they tend to be most acute between husbands and wives or parents and children, rather than between strangers.
　　
But let’s give feeling its due. The sheer reckless ardor of Mr. González Iñárritu’s filmmaking — the voracious close-ups, the sweeping landscape shots, the swiveling, hurtling camera movements — suggests a virtually limitless confidence in the power of the medium to make connections out of apparent discontinuities. His faith in cinema as a universal language could hardly be more evident.
　　
Some of the pieces of “Babel” are attached to one another by the banal lingua franca of television images, as events in North Africa, for instance, make the evening news in Tokyo. But Mr. González Iñárritu’s own visual grammar tries to go deeper, to suggest a common idiom of emotion present in certain immediately recognizable gestures and expressions. We may not be able to read minds or decipher words, he suggests, but we can surely decode faces, especially when we see them at close range and in distress. Loss, fear, pain, anguish — none of these emotions, it seems, are likely to be lost in translation.
　　
The most glamorous cast members are Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, who play an American couple on a desultory vacation in Morocco, trying to repair the damage done to their marriage by the death of their infant son. Their movie-star charisma is turned down to a low, flickering flame, and the easy sense of entitlement they sometimes betray belongs naturally to their characters, Susan and Richard, who nonetheless receive a brutal reminder that even the privileged are vulnerable to accident.
　　
Susan — the kind of tourist who worries that the local ice cubes carry disease — is badly wounded when a bullet is fired through a bus window, hitting her in the neck. The bullet comes from a gun belonging to Abdullah (Mustapha Rachidi), a goatherd, and used by his two sons, Ahmed (Said Tarchani) and Yussef (Boubker Ait El Caid), to keep jackals away from the herd.
　　
The gunmen and their victim are never in the frame together, and the consequences of the incident unfold in parallel crises. Susan and Richard wind up in a small town, waiting for an ambulance, facing the panic and impatience of their fellow holiday makers and relying on the kindness of strangers. Abdullah and his sons and neighbors, for their part, must deal with the harsh attentions of the Moroccan police, who are trying to defuse what threatens to become an international incident.


Babel suggests something coming out of the ether—always in a hurry but sometimes dropping clues as to where it's going and where it will end up. Chronology is jumbled as it was in 21 Grams, only this film's fudging of time is slightly less shrill, sometimes even soothing (a phone call received by one of the characters indicates that someone else—far away and close to death—might just turn out okay). In the end, though, it's not the linking devices, however desperate, that cripple the film (and the audience), but the stories themselves, which are jerry-rigged with the sort of scare tactics that tritely invite the cluck of one's tongue. In Mexico, Amelia's nephew Santiago (Gael García Bernal) shoots a bullet into the air (at which point you wonder if it will ricochet off a taco stand and go through someone's head), but not before he decapitates a chicken, scaring the shit out of Susan and Bill's lily-white son Mike (Nathan Gamble). The film delights in keeping its audience on edge, evoking life as a perpetual roller coaster ride of potential doom and gloom.

　　
In “Babel” there seems to be an active, palpable tension between the schematism of Mr. Arriaga’s scenario and the sensuality of Mr. González Iñárritu’s filmmaking. Some of the most exciting and powerful sequences — a Tokyo nightclub rave, the wedding of Amelia’s son — push beyond the constraints of the narrative and defy, at least for a time, the grim inevitability that hovers over the film.
　　
The sheer sensory exuberance of the film at once subverts the fatalism of its story and lends it whatever credibility it has. On paper, very little of it makes sense, but what is on screen has an almost physical impact. In the end “Babel,” like that tower in the book of Genesis, is a grand wreck, an incomplete monument to its own limitless ambition. But it isthere, on the landscape, a startling and imposing reality. It’s a folly, and also, perversely, a wonder.