Reviews2.Main Content
Babel
Adriana Barraza leading the field in Babel
Wed, 21 Feb 2007
A pair of younger eyes see the good in Babel - we asked enterprising sixth form student critic, Jamie Jackson-Ritchie, to cast his eye over one of the Best Picture Oscar contenders this year.
BABEL
In the Bible, the building of the Tower of Babel was an attempt to create a Tower which would reach as high as heaven. As punishment, God confused the builders by giving each of them a different language, thus making them unable to communicate and subsequently build the Tower. In Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, linguistic and cultural differences create barriers that lead to divides between races, cultures and families.
Pitt and Blanchett - BabelThe film tells four different stories: a Moroccan family whose acquisition of a gun causes death and destruction; an American couple, one of whom is shot at the beginning of the film whilst on a bus tour; the same couple’s children who accompany their long-term Mexican childminder to her son’s wedding with devastating consequences as they attempt re-entry to the United States; and finally, a Japanese deaf-mute teenager who is struggling to come to terms with life with her father after her mother’s suicide.
Iñárritu and the film’s writer, Guillermo Arriaga, have created a story which follows the notion of causality. One action sparks off a series of consequences which sweep around the globe. The sheer immensity of the film’s plot is impressive and, on the whole, the script is balanced, giving equal time to each story and allowing the four sets of characters to each take on journey which is both emotionally distressing and thought-provoking. As well as this the script allows time for more domesticated issues to be examined in detail, such as family communication. It is rare for a film of this scope to feature such personal issues and it makes a refreshing change from the series of films which have utilised the multiple narrative form of storytelling, and which Iñárritu and Arriaga revived with Amores Perros, which tend to focus on wider and often more political issues.
Visually Babel is superb, Rodrigo Prieto’s poetic and stunning way ensuring the concluding images of Babel remain with the audience long after the screen goes dark. In addition the scene in which Rinko Kukichi’s character, Chieko, goes to a Japanese nightclub offers a rare insight into the experiences of a deaf-mute character as the sound playing in the club is intermittently stopped, leaving the audience with a strange, empty and disorientating experience, presumably much like how the character herself experiences it.
Brad Pitt’s performance as a man desperately trying to save the life of his wife, Cate Blanchett, in a country far removed from his own, is both restrained and moving, with a desperate phone call to his son at the end of the film particularly choking. Kukichi’s performance is similarly quiet until her emotionally shattering final scene, with both sides extraordinary enough to warrant her Oscar nomination. However it is Babel’s second Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, Adriana Barraza as Pitt‘s long-standing childminder, who gives the film’s best performance. Her disintegration through the film is almost unbearable to witness and her final scenes on the American/Mexican border are the most distressing in the film.
If there is any criticism of Babel it is that, in trying to ensure all elements of the story link with the actual connections being particularly tenuous. The Tokyo story’s association with the other three in particular feels forced and this detracts from the issues of isolation, communication and grief being examined in the film as a whole. Better would have been for the link to the Tokyo story to have been left open-ended so as not to detract from the overall significance of the section.
But this is a minor criticism: Babel is essentially an excellent achievement which is incredibly accomplished and demonstrates Iñárritu and Arriaga’s ability to create stories which span the globe. Impressively the pair resist a “we are all connected” message in favour of demonstrating how language creates barriers to wealth, social security and emotional harmony.
This review is by Jamie Jackson-Ritchie, a student in his first year of sixth form who covered the London Film Festival in 2006 for his school newspaper.
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