Review

In Babel, their ambitious third major release, producer/director Alejandro González Iñárritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) use a familiar non-linear formula to display one tragic incident – the accidental shooting of an American tourist in Morocco – and the several unknowingly connected families that are either directly involved or affected. Though out of sequence, the butterfly effect takes the audience from Japan to Morocco, the United States and Mexico.

As with his previous efforts, Iñárritu provides a good handful of riveting sequences while intimately and unflinchingly focusing on extraordinarily uncomfortable human emotion. This time, however, sibling rivalry, marital discourse, separation anxiety, racial oppression, sexual discovery and the great fear of personal loss are blended with observations of human miscommunication on a global scale.

While the performances (by Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael García Bernal and a culturally-varied collection of professional and non-professional actors) as well as cinematography by Iñárritu’s regular director of photography Rodrigo Prieto (Frida, Brokeback Mountain) prove exceptional, the highly prevalent editing tends to hinder the effectiveness of Babel as a whole. There is so much going on within this film that the constant and often intentionally disorienting cross-cutting detracts from the emotional investment that the audience is expected to make in the characters of each segment. In addition, the portions of Babel featuring Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), a deaf teenager recovering from her mother’s suicide and looking for love in all the wrong places, are fascinating as a separate piece of filmmaking but seem to relate much less to the essential plot that is presented. This, along with much eye-pleasing but extraneous establishing footage, bumps the total running time up to an arguably unnecessary 143 minutes.

Babel is a rarity among similarly constructed cinematic puzzles due to the fact that the individual pieces will likely prove more interesting and exciting to the discerning eye than the fully assembled finished product. However, Iñárritu and Arriaga’s hearts, minds and intentions appear to be in the right place and the filmmaking aesthetics rarely disappoint.

 -- Robert O'Neill