Babel
(2006)
review by Died with Boots On

“In the beginning, all the Lord’s people, from all parts of the world, spoke one language.  Nothing they proposed was impossible for them.  But fearing what the spirit of man could accomplish, the Lord said, ‘Let us go down and confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.’ ”  Director Alejandro González Iñárritu makes films about six degrees of separation.  From his debuting ‘Amores Perros’ (‘Love’s a Bitch’) to his freak-accident thriller, ‘21 Grams,’ to his most recent masterpiece, ‘Babel,’ his movies explore how one small lapse in judgment can be the inciting incident for, literally, a whole world of trouble.  Unlike movies like ‘Crash,’ or ‘Monster’s Ball,’ his situations start out bad and just get worse and worse and worse, until they couldn’t possibly get any worse.  But then, of course, they do.

The movie follows four train wrecks waiting to happen.  The first two are cause and effect.  When a Sherpa-esque hunting guide sells his neighbor, Abdullah, his bolt-action Winchester rifle for 500 dirham and a goat, Abdullah presents the gun to his two sons.  The older of the two, Yussef (Boubker Ait El Caid), is a miserable shot.  The younger, Ahmed (Said Tarchani), is deadly with the weapon.  The hunting guide tells them to shoot and kill at least three Jackals with the gun, tells them that they can hit a mark up to three kilometers away with it.  While their father brings dried skins to the flea market, the two brothers take their father’s goats out to pasture and stand on top of a hill, aiming at rocks.  Doubting the gun can hit a mark three kilometers away, Yussef takes careful aim at a car winding along the lonely highway below.  He fires and misses, cursing the gun.  His brother takes the rifle out of his arms, nestles the butt against the groove of his shoulder, looks carefully down the barrel at a tour bus coming into view, and pulls the trigger.  The bus keeps going.  The boys look at each other and laugh, realizing the hunter tricked their father.  Just then, the bus screeches to a halt and swerves off the road into the wide shoulder.  Yussef and Ahmed are horrified, chasing each other back to their rathole hutch on the other side of the mountain.  They decide to ditch the gun in a shallow cave before returning home.

Traveling back in time, two American tourists, Richard (Pitt) and Susan (Blanchett), sit cross-legged before a small table on the terrace of a Moroccan restaurant.  A waiter brings them two Coke’s and two glasses of ice.  Richard plays the part of the unforgiven husband on his second honeymoon with his unforgiving wife.  Susan is a bitch.  When she isn’t reminding Richard what a piss-poor husband he’s been to her, she’s complaining about the honeymoon, about the disease-ridden ice in her glass.  Finally, they make their way back onto the tour bus.  Susan cranes her neck to press her forehead against the window.  She sees women wearing burqas and squeezes her husband’s hand.  With that, a small spider-webbing hole forms in the glass and Susan’s body goes limp.  The .27 caliber shell made no sound as it pierced the window.  Richard doesn’t even realize his wife’s been shot until he looks over and sees her blouse soaked in blood.  He frantically pats her cheek, cradling her neck, not sure why she is bleeding.  He finds the bullet wound at the nape of her neck and promptly screams for the bus driver to pull over.

Abdullah returns home and asks his sons how many jackals they killed.  They nervously tell him that they shot at one, but only scared it away.  Over dinner, he tells his wife that he had to take the long way into town because the highway was closed.  He tells his wife that he overheard police say that an American in a tour bus was targeted and killed by terrorists.  Meanwhile, Richard bounds down the aisle of the bus to stop a truck headed in the other direction.  He smacks the window with the palm of his hand and asks the driver for help.  The man murmurs in his native tongue and the two speak through each other in different languages.  The driver pumps the gas and Richard tears down the road after it.  He gives up and lopes back to the bus, asking the tour guide where the closest hospital is.  Anwar, the guide, says that it is about three hours down the highway, that the desert heat would probably kill his wife.  He then offers to take them down a dirt road to his town where his village doctor can look at her.  Not knowing what else to do, Richard agrees.  Anwar directs the bus driver down the dirt road.  Once they get to his small mud caked house, Richard carries his wife off the bus and places her gently on the dirt-floor of the hut.  The doctor examines her neck and tells Anwar that her shoulder bone is shattered, but that her spine is still intact.  He says that he needs to stitch up the bullet wound to prevent blood loss, but Susan is opposed to the idea.  Richard gives them permission for fear that she will die.  After talking to his friend, Anwar sadly reports that the U.S. won’t let the Moroccan government send an ambulance for his wife, that they are sending a helicopter, which will take much longer to arrive.

The story then introduces a teenaged Japanese schoolgirl named Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), who is a sexually frustrated deaf-mute.  She is a bittersweet girl who is never in a good mood.  One of her friends says that Chieko is always in a bad mood because she has never been fucked.  Chieko says that she will fuck the girl’s father to get rid of her mood.  Chieko’s father (Kôji Yakusho) drives her into Tokyo to meet her friends.  They briefly speak in conundrums about her mother’s death and how her father is doing the best he can, that he misses her too.  As Chieko gets out of the car, her father reminds her that she has a dentist’s appointment in the afternoon.  He blows her a kiss and she runs into the cyber café to meet up with her friends.  They giggle and gossip and check out the cute rock star boys at the other table.  While Chieko and her friend are playing an arcade game, one of the scenester boys comes over and asks if he can play with them.  Chieko nudges her friend because he can’t read his lips, and her friend asks him if he could speak a little slower.  This scares the scenester off.  Chieko sees him laughing at her with his friends, and she runs into the bathroom.  When her friend finds her, she is sobbing in one of the stalls.  She comes out and says that they think she is a monster, that she will show them the real hairy monster.  With that, she takes her panties off and walks back into the restaurant.  When she catches one of the boys’ eyes, she opens her legs for him.  With that, she remembers that she has a dentist’s appointment and leaves.  While the dentist leans in close to her mouth to look at a cavity, she licks his lips.  He jerks backward and looks at her with a startled look.  He leans back in and she does it again.  He asks what’s the matter with her, and before he can do anything else, she grabs his hand and shoves it down her skirt.  He tears his arm away and tells her to get out of his office immediately.

Leaving behind the sexually deprived schoolgirl, the fourth and final tangent follows a Mexican woman, Amelia (Adriana Barraza), who cares for two small white children as if they were her own.  She receives a call from the children’s father saying that there has been an incident and that they won’t be coming home for another day.  Amelia tells him that her son is getting married today, that she needs that day off.  He tells her that he will pay for a bigger and better wedding when he gets home, but that he needs her to watch the children for the day.  She hangs up the phone and immediately picks it back up, calling her nanny friends to ask for a favor.  When none of them can look after the kids, she resolves to bring them to the wedding.  Her nephew, Santiago (Gael García Bernal) picks them up and looks suspiciously at the children.  They cross the Mexican border without any difficulty and drive to the wedding.  With chickens fluttering throughout the streets and rowdy gunslingers firing pistols into the air, the children seem frightened.  When the wedding starts to die down, Santiago decides that he will drive home that night even though he is piss-drunk.  Amelia decides to go with him.  When they get to the Mexican border, the border guard leans in through the open window and notices the two children asleep in the backseat.  He asks to see their passports, and although Amelia produces them, he calls out two other border patrollers and tells them to search the trunk.  Finding nothing, he searches the glove box.  Again, nothing.  Finally, provoked by Santiago, the guard asks to see the children’s letters of consent to cross the border.  When Amelia doesn’t know what he is talking about, he promptly tells Santiago to “get out the vehicle.”  Another car pulls up behind them, and he instructs them to pull up a little further and park off to the side of the road.  Rather than complying, Santiago speeds off.  When the blinking lights of the border patrol come into sight in the rearview mirror, he peels off the road and ditches his aunt and the two children in the middle of nowhere, promising to come back for them.  Of course, he never does.

‘Babel’ is about communication breakdown; it’s about not being able to be understood.  When Richard and Susan are in Morocco, they are quite literally unable to communicate.  When Susan gets shot, no one can understand Richard’s cries for help.  There is no one to turn to.  When the two young boys accidentally shoot the American, they don’t tell their father.  With the poor Japanese girl, she desperately needs love, needs to feel loved, but can’t because she is a deaf-mute.  The communication breakdown with the Mexican woman transcends language, transcends speaking and being listened to.  It is a culture clash.  The ‘babble’ in this case is the stomach-turning racism and ignorance of a small-minded boarder patroller determined to keep Mexican immigrants out of his country.

Oscar-winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla is deadly with a stringed instrument.  He sets the mood for this gut-wrenching piece with a score that is both beautiful and heart racing at the same time.  Having written the music for Iñárritu’s other two major motion pictures, Santaolalla was the obvious choice.  Some of the third and fourth-billing actors were also convenient choices.  Boubker Ait El Caid and Said Tarchani are locals of Morocco and were cast on-location.  Their performances were just as strong as Brad Pitt’s and Cate Blanchett’s, and they may have gotten more face-time.

I can’t say enough good things about Alejandro González Iñárritu.  I knew from the first coming attraction I would love this movie.  I didn’t get the opportunity to see it the first time it came out in theaters, but fortunately for me, since it won the Golden Globe for best drama and received seven Oscar nominations, I got a second chance.  Don’t let this movie pass you by like it did me.  It is very good and I highly recommend it.