Everything’s Connected

Still intrigued? Perhaps, but in a much more abstract and less visceral way. The nature of dramaturgy tells us that these three characters will turn out to be connected, and we can't help but wonder how; the more the movie flits around among its disparate subplots, however, the less emotional energy we're willing to invest in any one of them. In part, that's just a matter of having our attention trisected. But we've also seen enough of these sprawling, multicharacter movies lately to suspect that somebody had three half-baked ideas instead of one good one.

Babel is the third film directed by Mexico's Alejandro González Iñárritu. If you saw either of his previous films, Amores Perros and 21 Grams, you know what to expect: multiple narratives rippling outward from some central act of violence, the upheaval forging unexpected connections among a multitude of disparate characters. Babel's fresh angle, reflected in its title, takes that disparity global, with stories set in San Diego, Tokyo and a small Moroccan village, plus a brief and disastrous jaunt south of the U.S. border. The cast, likewise, ranges from assured nonprofessionals to vaguely familiar faces (Japanese leading man Koji Yakusho, Mike Leigh regular Peter Wight) to the likes of Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt, with everyone receiving roughly equal weight. Here, the inciting incident (thanks, Syd Field) is a gunshot fired—without particular malice—by a couple of Moroccan youngsters who've just been handed their first rifle: the bullet strikes Blanchett, triggering a medical emergency that requires her children, back in California, to accompany their nanny to her son's wedding outside of Tijuana. Meanwhile, a deaf Japanese schoolgirl (remarkable newcomer Rinko Kikuchi), her puberty blues exacerbated by her disability, begins acting out in increasingly unstable ways; how her tale eventually gets linked to the Moroccan shooting incident I'll leave for you to discover, since I wouldn't want to deprive anyone of a good, sound forehead-slap.

For about an hour, while various balls remain suspended in midair, Babel proves reasonably engrossing. As always in González Iñárritu's work, individual moments have considerable power, and he remains a consummate stylist; the film's high point is his evocation of the deaf girl's experience in a crowded disco, with the sound design (alternating between ghostly silence and ear-splitting blasts of Earth, Wind and Fire) achieving much the same disorienting effect as the strobe lights. But his overall vision—shared with his regular screenwriter, Guillermo Arriaga—of mankind as one vast chain of pain-wracked dominoes is schematic and trite, and their structural splintering has quickly gone from innovative to exasperating. In Amores Perros, and to a lesser extent in 21 Grams, each episode felt as if it could easily have occupied its own movie—I think of the middle story in Perros (the dog trapped beneath the floorboards) as a superior stand-alone short. In Babel, only the Japanese segment offers such a compelling degree of texture and detail. Everything else, from a ludicrous skirmish with the border patrol to Brad Pitt's startlingly haggard complexion (complete with manufactured crow's feet), comes across like planks in a bone-dry and not terrible enlightening syllogism. In short, Babel overreaches. Can anybody think of a handy metaphor for that particular sin? I'm coming up blank.