Title: Babel
Cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Rinko Kikuchi, Adriana Barraza
Genre: Drama
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Release: (2006)
In pajamas, in a crib, in a room, in a house, on a street, in a town in America was Sam. Sam died. Richard and Susan lived.
In a hut, on a hill, near a village in Morocco are Yussef and Ahmed. One of them will die because Sam died and Richard and Susan lived.
In the den of a home, at the top of a tower, in Japan is Chieko. Chieko and her father will be forced to relive the pain of her mother’s suicide, a pain Chieko may not be able to survive again, because of what Yussef and Ahmed did after Sam died and Richard and Susan lived.
In a red dress and handcuffs, on a chair, in a jail, on the southern U.S. border is Amelia. Amelia is about to lose everything she has and has known for the past two decades of her life because Chieko’s father accidentally set motion what Yussef and Ahmed did after Sam died and Richard and Susan lived.
On a bench, at a table, by a stage, behind a house, down a long dirt road in Mexico are Mike and Debbie. Mike and Debbie are a hundred miles from home, thousands of miles from their parents, at a house they don’t know among a mob of strangers they can’t understand. Mike and Debbie are both under ten years old and things will get worse for them before they get better. All because of what Amelia did when Chieko’s father accidentally set motion what Yussef and Ahmed did after Sam died and Richard and Susan lived.
Babel is director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s sprawling, ambitious and deftly woven look at the inescapable interconnectedness of life on Earth, and the consequences of man’s continued insistence that it were otherwise. Iñárritu demonstrates this very abstract concept in a very concrete way, by setting each of his characters in motion with a series of seemingly innocuous decisions and following the unseen effects of each decision as intently as if he were following the character. In fact, the characters themselves often remain behind, absorbed in their own situations and oblivious to the world beyond their everyday lives, as Iñárritu follows and illuminates the trail of the invisible, intercontinental Rube Goldberg machine that can be set in motion by any one of the decisions we make.
For example, say for some ridiculous reason you decided not to check in here and read my latest reviews one week. Instead of setting aside the entire day to sit at your computer and keep refreshing your internet browser until the new reviews post, as you devotedly do every week, you let yourself get guilted into going to your kid’s tenth birthday party. As soon as you pull in the driveway you know made a mistake, but you try to make the best of it and just hope there’s an open bar. Meanwhile, back at your office, a package gets delivered to you that someone needs to sign for. Since you’re not there, the UPS guy goes around looking for someone who will take it. One of the sales guys agrees to sign for it and then starts talking the UPS guy’s ear off about some obnoxious thing that a sales guys would talk about, like sales. Eventually the sales guy gets distracted when the sound of his Rihanna custom ringtone starts blaring from the phone clipped on his belt, and the UPS guy finally gets away, but not before he is suddenly way behind schedule. As he hurries to try to finish his last deliveries in the late afternoon, he passes an ambulance coming in the other direction down a busy road, carrying in it the little, old lady who had been waiting all day for her insulin refills from Canada that are sitting in the back of his truck. He barely notices that ambulance pass him by, as he argues on the phone with his ex-wife about needing to pick the kids up late so he can finish his last few deliveries. His ex-wife has a weekend trip planned with her new boyfriend and a ferry to catch that they’ll miss if she has to wait at home with the kids an extra hour for him. She knows he’s doing this on purpose just to try to control her and tells him to forget seeing the kids this weekend and she’s just going to bring them to her mother’s house instead. She hangs up on him before he can argue any more and tells the kids that their dad’s not coming. As she packs the kids into the car to take to her mother’s, she calls her new boyfriend to tell him about what happened and ask him to pick her up there instead. He’s already on the highway on his way to her house, but is understanding and gets off at the next exit to turn around and head back towards the mother’s house. As he comes down the off-ramp he pulls up to the light at the bottom and waits for it to change. It does, and he pulls out and starts to turn left under the overpass when the front end of his car is clipped by a speeding van driven by a man in a clown suit who was trying to beat the red. The boyfriend is alright, though his car isn’t so lucky. The man in the clown suit is tossed from clear of his van through the sliding driver’s side door he liked to leave open while he was driving. He is laying near the divider, unconscious at best. He is taken to the hospital where he remains in critical condition for several hours, the same hours that you spend trying to console your inconsolable kid on his tenth birthday party, who is embarrassed because he promised all his friends he was going to have a clown doing magic tricks at his birthday party but his friends all have to leave now and the clown never showed up.
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