Babel
by Alejandro González Iñárritu
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael García Bernal, Mohamed Akhzam, Peter WightDirector: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Brand: PARAMOUNT HOME VIDEO
Producer: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Writer: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Producer: Ahmed Abounouom
Producer: Ann Ruark
Producer: Corinne Golden Weber
Producer: Jon Kilik
Writer: Guillermo Arriaga
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Published), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 143 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-02-20
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Paramount
Movie Reviews of Babel
Movie Review: Speaking in tongues...
Summary: 5 Stars
An ominous shot in the Moroccan hinterlands echoes in a Mexican village, cracks across Tokyo`s metallic skyline. Are the consequences of our actions so interconnected, so inextricable from one another? According to Alejandro Inarritu`s masterful creation, `Babel,` the answer is yes.
Few plots are as labyrinthine as `Babel`s,` and even fewer manage to remain as comprehensible and engaging as this one. An impoverished Moroccan family of goat herders barters for a new hunting rifle to help protect their flocks. The herder`s sons taunt each other into ever greater feats of marksmanship when a fateful target looms into view: a tourist bus lumbering up a mountain highway. His turn to trump his brother`s paltry aim, the younger son pulls the trigger and soon sets off an avalanche of unforeseen consequences.
The stray bullet finds home in an embittered American housewife (Cate Blanchett), angered and confused as to why she and her husband (Brad Pitt) are sweating things out in such a desolate destination. The renegade shot stops such musing short as she slowly bleeds out and her husband`s increasingly ugly American behavior takes over. An American shot in an Islamic backwater...it must be `terrorists.`
As the bus veers into a nearby village for medical assistance, the shot sounds an echo heard worlds away. Tokyo police search out the original owner of the rifle, while the American couple`s children back in Southern California are shuffled off to their Mexican housekeeper`s (Adriana Barraza) Baja village for her son`s wedding. Sound convoluted? Preposterous? Unlikely in the extreme? As Innaritu`s skilled direction weaves the storyline ever deeper, your disbelief becomes thoroughly suspended as the improbable, the impossible comes to life.
As Tokyo`s police track down the gun`s owner, his deaf-mute daughter (Rinko Kikuchi in a truly heart-wrenching debut performance) unloads a Pandora`s box of hidden pain. Deprived a mother by suicide, Kikuchi`s character is adrift in a world that neither understands her nor she it. The film shows that even when words are clear and intelligible, they rarely mirror the truth of our desires and needs. Kikuchi`s character is a pathetic case in point. Treated as an outcast by the speaking world around her, her hunger for human connection intensifies. She screams for contact, yet nobody listens. She finally resorts to the only language left her, her physical body, to convey her loneliness and hunger for connection. Yet, those confronted by her glaring behavior and physical directness miss the deeper message. Signals are misread, and meanings get lost in translation. She, like all the film`s characters, gets lost in a babel of words bereft their true message.
Innaritu`s film shows a human community stumbling ever further away from comprehension, from connection. Botched transmissions and fumbled receptions clutter each frame. Lies overlap lies until words are but empty vessels, stripped of content. In the village where Pitt`s character scurries helplessly, English-language television networks ramble on about `terrorist cells` and an `American tourist killed` (she survives). When the Moroccan gendarmes descend upon the goat herder's family, misinformation swarms like flies. The police thugs beat up those whose `answers` make no sense. As the housekeeper returns from Mexico with her American charges, her nephew (the fiery Gael Garcia Bernal) engages in a verbal cat-and-mouse game with the border guards until chaos overcomes. The housekeeper, with her limited English, is unable to clarify an otherwise straightforward situation. Confusion spreads like a cancer and the consequences approach the catastrophic.
Despite the cacophony of voice and miscue, `Babel` does not descend into absolute despair. Innaritu does offer hope that understanding is still possible. The children of this film carry its redemption. Throughout the film, they knowingly and unknowingly set right the confusions adults sow. The housekeeper talks to her American ninos in Spanish and they passively, instinctively comprehend. In the Moroccan village, while parents and police turn to violence, the youngest son (Mohamed Akhzam in an amazing performance) ends the mayhem by divulging the truth the adults have failed to grasp.
`Babel` ends painfully, tragically. A boy chocks the wheel of violence but not without a horrible price. A housekeeper saves her charges but loses her freedom. A lonely girl threatens suicide. What makes these moments all the more pathetic is that they could have been avoided. Innaritu suggests our babel of tongues, customs, and walls deny us the chance of celebrating our common humanness. The best we can hope for is support from those closest to us, namely our own flesh and blood. The muted, misunderstood teen clings to her father, the hapless American tourists realize their children hold the keys to contentment, the deported housekeeper finds refuge in her son`s arms, and the Moroccan father grieves a murdered son, saved perhaps an even worse fate.
While Innaritu`s political subtext may grate some viewers the wrong way (Are American lives worth more?), don`t let that scare you away from a provocative, thoughtful and emotionally enriching experience. While the big names (Pitt and Blanchett) fill the film`s minor roles, it is the unknowns and child actors who deliver `Babel`s` masterful performances. `Babel` celebrates those outside the Hollywood pale...the Bernals... the Barazas... the Kikuchis... the Akhzams. Combined with Gustavo Santaolalla`s evocative soundtrack (a great follow up to his Brokeback Mountain work) and Rodriego Prieto`s lush, encompassing panoramas of Sahel scrabble and Tokyo steel, their all too human portrayals make `Babel` a film for the ages.
Summary of Babel
In Babel, a tragic incident involving an American couple in Morocco sparks a chain of events for four families in different countries throughout the world. In the struggle to overcome isolation, fear, and displacement, each character discovers that it is family that ultimately provides solace.In the remote sands of the Moroccan desert, a rifle shot rings out-- detonating a chain of events that will link an American tourist couple?s frantic struggle to survive, two Moroccan boys involved in an accidental crime, a nanny illegally crossing into Mexico with two American children, and a Japanese teen rebel whose father is sought by the police in Tokyo. Separated by clashing cultures and sprawling distances, each of these four disparate groups of people are nevertheless hurtling towards a shared destiny of isolation and grief. In the course of just a few days, they will each face the dizzying sensation of becoming profoundly lost ? lost in the desert, lost to the world, lost to themselves ? as they are pushed to the farthest edges of confusion and fear as well as to the very depths of connection and love.
In this mesmerizing, emotional film that was shot in three continents and four languages ? and traverses both the deeply personal and the explosively political -- acclaimed director Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams, Amores Perros) explores with shattering realism the nature of the barriers that seem to separate humankind. In doing so, he evokes the ancient concept of Babel and questions its modern day implications: the mistaken identities, misunderstandings and missed chances for communication that-- though often unseen-- drive our contemporary lives. Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael García Bernal, Kôji Yakusho, Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi lead an international ensemble of actors and non-professional actors from Morocco, Tijuana and Tokyo, who enrich Babel?s take on cultural diversity and enhance its powerful examination of the links and frontiers between and within us.
Brilliantly conceived, superbly directed, and beautifully acted, Babel is inarguably one of the best films of 2006. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu and his co-writer, Guillermo Arriaga (the two also collaborated on Amores Perros and 21 Grams) weave together the disparate strands of their story into a finely hewn fabric by focusing on what appear to be several equally incongruent characters: an American (Brad Pitt) touring Morocco with his wife (Cate Blanchett) become the focus of an international incident also involving a hardscrabble Moroccan farmer (Mustapha Rachidi) struggling to keep his two young sons in line and his family together. A San Diego nanny (Adriana Barraza), her employers absent, makes the disastrous decision to take their kids with her to a wedding in Mexico. And a deaf-mute Japanese teen (the extraordinary Rinko Kikuchi) deals with a relationship with her father (Koji Yakusho) and the world in general that's been upended by the death of her mother. It is perhaps not surprising, or particularly original, that a gun is the device that ties these people together. Yet Babel isn't merely about violence and its tragic consequences. It's about communication, and especially the lack of it--both intercultural, raising issues like terrorism and immigration, and intracultural, as basic as husbands talking to their wives and parents understanding their children. Iñárritu's command of his medium, sound and visual alike, is extraordinary; the camera work is by turns kinetic and restrained, the music always well matched to the scenes, the editing deft but not confusing, and the film (which clocks in at a lengthy 143 minutes) is filled with indelible moments. Many of those moments are also pretty stark and grim, and no will claim that all of this leads to a "happy" ending, but there is a sense of reconciliation, perhaps even resolution. "If You Want to be Understood... Listen," goes the tagline. And if you want a movie that will leave you thinking, Babel is it. --Sam Graham
Beyond Babel
 Other Interweaving Storylines on DVD |  Other DVDs by Director Alejandro González Iñárritu |  Why We Love Cate Blanchett |
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