Border Crossings
Alejandro González Iñárritu goes multinational with 'Babel'
By Andy Klein
Welcome to the Make Your Own Alejandro González Iñárritu Movie kit! Follow these simple instructions and you too can dazzle the cineastes of the world:
1. Think of a sudden, tragic accident.
2. Imagine the direct and indirect repercussions of that single moment in the lives of at least three groups of people.
3. Take these various stories, and intercut them, with occasional moments showing how these lives are all interconnected.
4. Unmoor the entire thing from any standard chronology, whipping back and forth in brief segments, even as the film as a whole moves generally forward in time.
5. Come up with a title that relates to thematic concerns running through all the threads, making it vaguer and more elliptical with each new film.
6. Cast increasingly bankable stars, who will take a big pay cut for chance to act up a storm.
7. Do not inadvertently allow the length to dip below two hours.
8. Shoot, cut, score, and release.
9. Go for a nice, relaxing massage to ease stress of carrying world's weight on shoulders.
OK, maybe that's a little snotty. But, in González Iñárritu's three features, he's followed a consistent template as rigorously as a '30s hack turning out quickie westerns for Republic. This is not necessarily a bad thing ... if the results enthrall or entertain or enlighten or do any one of the other things that cinema can do.
If only.
Before you fans start pulling out your poison pens, rest assured that I've thought long and hard about why Mr. González Iñárritu's films leave me cold, and I'm not at all convinced that I'm arguing from a loftier position. Consider my negative reaction - well, actually, it's more of a moderately, but still disappointed, positive reaction - as a work in progress.
From the very opening, you can tell that Babel, González Iñárritu's latest, is going to be a big departure: Instead of a brutal car accident kicking off the story - as in Amores Perros (2001) and 21 Grams (2003) - it's a brutal gun accident. Whole nother deal, man. The two adolescent sons of a Moroccan goatherder are quibbling about who is better with the rifle Dad has recently purchased to kill the (literal) jackals threatening his herd. One fires a shot toward a passing bus. As luck would have it, the bullet hits the worst possible target, politically speaking: an American, one of a Southern California couple (Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett), for whom this unlikely vacation was supposed to be a form of marriage therapy. More or less in the middle of nowhere and without knowing the local tongue, they find their quest for emergency medical care to be arduous.
The two have left their children - Mike (Nathan Gamble) and Debbie (Elle Fanning) - back home in the care of Amelia (Adriana Barraza), their longtime nanny. The shooting delays their return long enough that Amelia is going to have to forgo her son's wedding in Mexico to look after the kids. Her fairly reasonable solution is to take the kids with her for the one-day excursion. Downsides: some nervousness and deception at the border, and the volatility of the driver, her irresponsible nephew (Gael García Bernal).
If the stories of the goatherder's family, the American couple, and Mexico/U.S. wedding seem like a lot to juggle, be informed that there's another entire story, set in Tokyo, with a much more tenuous plot connection to the others that isn't made clear until very late in the film. It centers on Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), a deaf girl desperately craving romantic or sexual validation, and her quietly exasperated, widower father (Kôji Yakusho).
Whereas the stories in Amores Perros all revolved around love conflicts and those in 21 Grams about free will and personal responsibility (and the meaning of life in general), those in Babel are about miscommunication and cultural misunderstanding ... or, at least, that's what the title suggests and what the director has said in interviews. But, frankly, that's not really how it plays out.
The language and cultural barriers in the Moroccan segments exacerbate the couple's situation but aren't really central to it: Things would transpire relatively similarly regardless. The same is true in the American/Mexican scenes: The conflicts and increasing complications have almost nothing to do with the occasional moments of miscommunication. (They have a lot more to do with García Bernal's character being a total jerk ... and that hardly seems culturally determined.)
Only in the Japanese story is communication central: Chieko's troubles stem largely from her deafness and the way it segregates her from her contemporaries. In this story, however, the notion of cultural dislocation or of ethnic/national alienation is utterly absent.
So what do all of Babel's story threads have in common? They're all about people who are culturally uprooted or fish out of water or neither of those but otherwise frustrated by faulty communication - which is kind of like saying: they're all about "life" ... or "people" ... or "the world" ... dude.
Yet even these aspects don't more than passingly influence the characters' fates or the direction of the drama. What, then, is Babel all about? All together now: "It's about two hours and 20 minutes."
Jeez. What is my problem? Why does González Iñárritu make me wax so contemptuous?
I got off on the wrong foot with Amores Perros, which arrived in the U.S. way oversold. I didn't hate it; I thought it was OK. I would have been irritated by the extent to which it recycled aspects of Pulp Fiction if González Iñárritu hadn't drolly acknowledged the Tarantino connection with his unmissable reworking of Reservoir Dogs in the opening sequence. But the acclaim seemed to suggest that Amores Perros was just like Pulp Fiction, but realer ... or more serious ... or somehow "more grownup." In fact, it was, in sum, "about" less than its model. (By the way, in structure, plot, and theme, Babel is more than a little similar to Milcho Manchevski's considerably superior 1994 Oscar nominee Before the Rain.)
So: technically interesting, if derivative; moderately engaging, but hardly earth-shattering, stories (particularly the third one); some good performances.
21 Grams upped the ante, with riveting performances. It was like a framework to allow really heavy thespians to work out; and they obliged ... in spades. But still ... .
Babel continues the pattern. Pitt, whose star notoriety has in recent years overshadowed his acting talent, is terrific in his first really middle-aged role. Blanchett makes the most of a less rewarding part. Yakusho, a certifiably great actor and perhaps the greatest star presence in Japanese cinema since Mifune, is good, but his part is so small that it barely exists. (Is this a case of casting for the benefit of the Japanese distributors?)
If there's any single aspect of González Iñárritu's work that I can pinpoint as the source of my irritation - outside of the hype and his monumental self-seriousness - it's that all his films feel overly "directed" ... in the worst sense of the word. That is, the jumbled chronology seems arbitrary rather than utilitarian. Worse yet, the plotting feels even more arbitrary: Bad things don't merely happen to his characters; González Iñárritu inflicts these catastrophes on them. There isn't a moment in his films when I don't sense the chess player pushing his pawns around a rigged board.
Published: 10/26/2006
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