Incendiary 'Babel' plays connect-the-plots

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Friday, November 10, 2006

If artistic ambition could be turned into currency, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu might become one of the world's richest men.

Inarritu's movies - Amores Perros, 21 Grams and now Babel - deal with a fragmented but interconnected world, so much so that it can seem as if Inarritu refuses to push anything off his plate. He assembles a mural from jagged, uncompromising pieces of narrative and finds a disturbing beauty in the resultant view.

Working with writer Guillermo Arriaga, Inarritu attempts the near impossible with Babel: to present a comprehensive, telling picture of current reality. The fact that he's even able to come close represents a kind of triumph. He's looking for a cinema that speaks to our present fractured moment, capturing both its chaos and its possibilities.

As has been the case with all of Inarritu's movies, Babel wraps itself around a variety of story lines, making room for moments of nearly unbearable intensity. True to its title, Babel hinges on missed and faulty communications of both the personal and the cultural variety. It's a sweeping movie about characters who often suffer from tunnel vision.

Inarritu's globe-hopping takes us to Morocco, Japan, the United States and Mexico, slowly revealing how each of the tales connects, a ploy that stretches our awareness, but not in an overly intellectual way.

Inarritu's amazing ability to couple images and sound creates an intensity that can overpower our ability to think. When a boy fires a shot in the mountains of Morocco, the event that ostensibly lights the movie's narrative fuse, we don't just hear the shot, we feel it. The sound pierces the armor of our defenses as it echoes across the barren Moroccan landscape.

To understand how this rifle shot connects with the upscale lives of a San Diego couple (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) or how it links to the story of a Japanese father (Koji Yakusho) and his rebellious deaf daughter (Rinko Kikuchi) or why it ripples through the story of a Mexican nanny (Adriana Barraza) and her wildly irresponsible nephew (Gael Garcia Bernal), you'll have to see the movie.

Know, though, that whether Inarritu is manipulating sound (a throbbing scene in a Tokyo nightclub) or heightening tension (a conflict among passengers on a tourist bus in Morocco), he continually expresses his preference for supercharged drama.

He raises the cinematic temperature, perhaps in hopes that a kind of truth will be glimpsed through the fire. It's not so much that he wants to tell us that people are connected in strange ways as that he wants us to feel the power of such a simple assertion with its potential for joy, suffering and profound shifts in a life's direction.

The performances throughout the movie are good. I couldn't quite forget that I was watching Pitt, even though he does his best to fit into the fabric of the film. Blanchett, who's wounded and on her back through most of the movie, seems incapable of hitting a false note. And as a deaf girl dealing with her emerging sexuality, as well as with guilt and sorrow, Kikuchi is an absolute wonder.

Each of the stories in Inarritu's sprawling movie becomes part of an expansive fabric, which isn't to say the narrative avoids some unjustified leaps. It's difficult to believe, for example, that Barraza's nanny, an illegal immigrant in the U.S., wouldn't have given a little more thought to the mechanics of crossing the border for a return visit, a key element in the movie's intertwined plots.

But Inarritu's extraordinary talent doesn't entirely depend on dotting every "i" and crossing every "t." In a world where even extraordinary events can quickly be reduced to banality, Inarritu tries to shake off the numbness. He evidently wants us to feel every minute of his movie. He's drilling without Novocaine and, yes, sometimes pushing too hard. But some of us are jolted toward fresh ways of looking, all the while feeling the dizzying spin of a world in which rampant narcissism too often blurs our ability to see.

Robert Denerstein is the film critic. Denersteinb@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5424