BEFORE: Brad Pitt carries over, as does the theme of personal tragedies. One more night of death and loss, then I've got to pull out of this subject matter. Tonight's film clocks in at just under two and a half hours, which is still long but not as long as last night's snore-fest. I went to another beer dinner last night, one which was very liberal with refills, so the challenge here will be one of concentration and staying awake.
THE PLOT: Tragedy strikes a married couple on vacation in the Moroccan desert, touching off an interlocking story involving four different families.
AFTER: A Mexican wedding, a couple vacationing in Morocco, a family of goat-herders, and a shy deaf Japanese girl looking for intimacy. At first it seems like these four plotlines couldn't be more different, but as the film progresses, we learn the ways that the characters are all connected to each other, and the way that one tragic mistake snowballs and eventually affects them all.
The four situations occur at different times - each moves forward at its own speed (the speed appropriate to tell each story in detail), and an exact timeline of all the events is defiantly NOT maintained, so as a result the audience is flung backwards and forwards in time - this is a personal bugaboo of mine when it comes to the language of film.
Surprisingly, I'm going to allow it tonight. Not excuse it, just allow it. Looking back on the film, there's really no other way to tell THESE particular stories, and still maintain an air of suspense. I can imagine a string of editors who quit this film out of frustration, and the director's careless disregard for the laws of time - but the alternative would be to tell 1/4 of the story in sequence, then move on to another set of characters and their story arc, and so on. I think the film would have ended in the same place, but by cross-cutting the audience is kept hanging on the fates of four storylines simultaneously, which is a neat trick. "Traffic" and "Pulp Fiction" are the only other films I'm aware of to try this, and even "Pulp Fiction" worked in sections rather than cross-cutting between the storylines. A very high degree of difficulty here. (Oh, wait, I forgot "21 Grams" from the same director as "Babel". My bad.)
As one might imagine, the cultures of the four countries (U.S., Mexico, Japan, and Morocco) are quite different, shockingly so in direct contrast. There's some material about the language barriers (hence the title reference to the biblical Tower of Babel) which we encounter when we travel, but also seen in the story of the deaf Japanese girl who can only communicate by signing or writing something down. The American kids who are taken to the Mexican wedding seem to understand Spanish, but are unprepared for watching a man behead a chicken, or for the guns fired in celebration. And really, aren't we all just innocent kids at Mexican weddings, or shy deaf horny Japanese schoolgirls at heart? No, wait, that can't be right...
There are parts here that are shocking and even difficult to watch - all four situations seem to spiral out of control, each in a different way and at a different speed, to the point where you might wonder how, or even if, the characters will get out of their terrible situations. As the blurb on the DVD cover reminded me, tragedy is universal. But, so is hope.
That being said, a lot of people turn to movies to escape, to forget their problems and cares. A movie filled with other people's problems seems to be counter-productive in that regard, except perhaps to remind us that our petty problems could in fact be much, much worse. Is that the take-away?
NITPICK POINT: It's great to see a couple that wants to reconcile, for the sake of their kids. But, did they have to travel halfway around the world to do that? As a result, the kids were left with a nanny, which led to another chain of bad events. If you want to take care of your kids, start by being THERE. You know, with them.
Also starring Cate Blanchett (last seen in "The Aviator"), Adriana Barraza, Gael Garcia Bernal, Elle Fanning (last heard in "Astro Boy"), Rinko Kikuchi, with cameos from Michael Peña (last seen in "Everything Must Go"), Clifton Collins Jr. (last seen in "Sunshine Cleaning", a new character actor for me to track) and Dermot Crowley (General Madine from "Return of the Jedi").
RATING: 6 out of 10 border guards
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