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Genre |
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Drama |
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Running Time |
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142 min |
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Distributor |
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Paramount Classics |
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 Official Website |
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NEW YORK REVIEW
The vocabulary of mainstream movies has changed radically in the past decade: Now, when filmmakers leap back and forth in time, radically shift perspectives, juxtapose narrative lines with no apparent connection, and withhold key information, audiences rarely question what they’re seeing. Maybe they ought to. In their last collaboration, 21 Grams, the director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga did syntactical acrobatics to disguise what a dreary and exploitive little soap opera they’d made. Their new movie, Babel, is more mysterious and less coherent.
An American (Cate Blanchett) on a tour bus in Morocco is severely wounded by a bullet out of nowhere (it comes from two boys playing with a rifle), and her husband (a bearded, puffy Brad Pitt doing a George Clooney Oscar run) kneels for hour after agonizing hour at her side in a remote village, trying to keep her alive until help comes. Meanwhile, two cute San Diego kids are whisked to rural Mexico when their babysitter (Adriana Barraza), left mysteriously to her own devices, feels compelled to attend her son’s wedding. Across the world, a deaf-mute Japanese teenager (Kôji Yakusho) removes her undies and flashes her privates at a group of boys—and then at anyone who’ll look at her.
The theme appears to be Americans who are scarily vulnerable in the impoverished Third World—but what does that disturbed Japanese girl have to do with anything? There is a connection, it turns out, but a tenuous one, and when the filmmakers start playing fancy tricks with the timeline, you might be tempted to throw up your hands. Tricky storytelling is an irritant when you can’t trust the storyteller. —Reviewed by David Edelstein, New York Magazine
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Release Date: 10/27/06 (Future Release)
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