Babel: Movie, DVD, HD DVD, Blu-ray disc Review (2006)

(Originally published 2006)

If you know and love the work of Mexican-born director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, you understand going into his films that you must do so armed with a good deal of trust.

He is a director devoted to developing complex characters and dense story lines around a convoluted technique. For some, the nonlinear haze in which he works can be off-putting. But for those who know that Inarritu is a master at pulling together the impossible, it can be enormously satisfying to watch him pull it off.

He doesn’t wish to do so alone. Mirroring his most obvious influences — Luis Bunuel, Quentin Tarantino and Pedro Almodovar (though without the latter’s humor) — he asks his audience to join him in the work of piecing together the difficult narrative. In this canned environment of so many rote movies, that’s a refreshing approach, particularly if there is a satisfying payoff at hand.

In the director’s previous films, the Academy Award-nominated "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," the payoffs were huge and emotionally devastating. That’s less the case for "Babel," but only because his style and his themes have become familiar.

Just as in "Perros" and "Grams," "Babel" also builds its plot around seemingly disconnected events that slam together toward the end. The film, based on a script by Inarritu’s longtime collaborator Guillermo Arriaga, focuses on four stories, with six different languages used to tell them.

In the Moroccan desert, two boys are given a rifle by their father (Mustapha Rachidi) to protect the family’s goats. In Japan, a deaf girl (Rinko Kikuchi), still reeling from her mother’s suicide, is trying to reconcile her relationship with her father (Koji Yakusho) while she flirts recklessly with the rush of her own sexual awakening.

In San Diego, a Mexican nanny named Amelia (Adriana Barraza, amazing) risks everything by taking her two young, towheaded charges across the border so she can attend her only son’s wedding. Meanwhile, the children’s bickering parents, Susan and Richard (Cate Blanchett and a very good Brad Pitt), are in Morocco on a tour bus when Susan suddenly is shot through the neck.

For the media, the shooting naturally is targeted as a terrorist act. But for us, the question isn’t who did it — we know it was one of the two boys who shot at the tour bus. Instead, the broader question is the significance of that gunshot and how its ramifications will launch a global ripple. It’s that ripple that assembles the film into a surreal sort of order.

Since it’s critical not to reveal too much more, we won’t. Still, key to the success of this disturbing, often harrowing movie goes beyond its Biblical echoes. Additional weight is derived in how Inarritu refuses to spoon-feed his audiences anything. He’d rather you starve than make concessions to his vision. His movie manipulates, but countering that are scenes that genuinely shake and disturb. As with so many of the film’s characters, you leave feeling raw, used up. "Babel" isn’t something you forget on the drive home. Instead, you are compelled to discuss it and how it reflects the state of the world.

Grade: A-