Towering 'Babel' is an ambitious tale of human disconnection

November 03, 2006|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

With their new film, director Alejandro González Iñárritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga have built their own exquisitely cinematic Tower of Babel, and the proportions are nearly biblical. Ambitiously vaulting toward the heavens, a global testament to the curiously incommunicative species that is man, "Babel" is a ziggurat of brilliant pieces built on sand. It's also this season's "Crash," a movie you know is Important because it never stops telling you so.

Real, incisive human moments pierce the murk, all the more valuable for feeling throwaway -- the film struggles to be as true as it is portentous. One responds to such empathetic hectoring or one doesn't; either the sight of so many different characters bursting into tears brings on your own catharsis or leaves you feeling as if the movie's doing the weeping for you.

Using a style similar to González Iñárritu and Arriaga's previous (and better) films, "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," "Babel" tells four separate stories that slowly reveal their interconnectedness. The one on the movie posters stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as Richard and Susan, wealthy Americans fleeing a family tragedy by touring Morocco on a bus. Nearby, the two young sons (Boubker Ait El Caid and Said Tarchani) of a goat herder (Abdelkader Bara) toy with a gun they've been given to ward off jackals; the resulting accident brings a grievously wounded Susan to a tiny desert village where her life hangs in the balance.

Meanwhile, in San Diego, a Mexican nanny named Amelia (Adriana Barraza) is forced by circumstances to take her two young Anglo charges (Elle Fanning and Nathan Gamble) across the border to her son's wedding. In Tokyo, a deaf-mute teenage girl named Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) batters against the wall of her isolation, acting out her hormonal rage with shocking lack of restraint.

What's the connection? There are plot hooks linking these characters together, but the filmmakers' larger message is that they are us and we are them and we're all in the same miserable boat. Language -- and there are six of them in "Babel" if you count the signing -- is the governing metaphor for our fall from grace, but there are barriers to understanding everywhere, from the U S -Mexican border Amelia crosses and recrosses in mounting distress to the sheet of bus-window glass that keeps Susan from encountering the Third World (and that is subsequently pierced with eerie silence ) .