Movie Review: Babel

Considered the “great film” of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, an early indicator of its Oscar potential, Babel is a film which shares notable characteristics with recent successful indies capable of garnering the full attention of Hollywood.

Looking like Syriana in its scope, feeling like an international version of Crash, Babel is the interweaving of stories about people in crisis – their crises arising from misunderstandings and failed communication – culminating in a tense drama, as the interconnected nature of their stories is revealed.

Filmed in the United States (San Diego), Mexico, Morocco and Japan, with its cast ranging from marquee (Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael García Bernal) to talented newcomers (Rinko Kikuchi) and first-time actors pulled from the film’s landscape, the result takes on an unpretentious and intimate use of the medium to translate the story in the universal language of human emotions. A powerful example of this occurs in a Japanese nightclub in which a deaf teenager’s latest episode of rejection is depicted by strobing colored lights and empty silence.

The one-word title “Babel” refers to “a scene of noise and confusion,” with discord depicted in the four vignettes specifically, later tied together into a larger picture of compassion and empathy for others. The four stories are told in tight sequences, loosely linked in narrative to their counterparts, but deeply embedded by way of the pain and fear of the characters.

Beginning with two boys left to watch over a herd of goats with a high-powered rifle, an American tourist is accidentally shot on a bus in a desolate part of Morocco. Ending with a young girl coming to terms with her emotions following the death of her mother, any attempt to describe in words what happens in between would be futile. The response, though, is visceral and emotive.

Acclaimed duo, writer Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) teamed up to tell this story, which could be their last collaboration. The news from the festival circuit has the two creators responsible for breathing new life into Mexican cinema in the midst of their own prideful miscommunication.

Babel opens today.

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