Babel
(Alejandro González Iñárritu, USA)

Since there are now enough films to its credit for it to almost officially qualify as a genre, it should be noted that the “we-are-all-connected” conceit is not intrinsically flawed, despite the often lamentable results. Crash is a head-smacking horror because it is poorly conceived and atrociously written and performed, which makes the conceit appallingly reductive and ignorant of the very universal reality it pretends to reveal. This latter presumption is likely what makes the whole idea of the genre so distasteful: the conviction that by simply stitching together a series of disparate narrative strands through rankly engineered points of intersection, filmmakers have automatically made Art that’s About Something, since so many Things are indeed going on. It’s only logical to counter that if each of those strands is concerned with nothing other than their relation to each other, they are in fact about nothing—and in the case of Babel, the only revelation of globally shared experience is the unsurprising one that banality in four languages is merely the fourth power of banality in one.

Alejandro González Iñárritu, of course, is one of the genre’s most assiduous practitioners, along with his northern compatriot Stephen Gaghan, and what’s unfortunate about his career thus far is that the narrative pattern to which he’s committed himself has made it difficult to gauge his talent, Cannes prize aside. As storytelling appears to become less and less important both to filmmakers and critics, the connection conceit is perhaps the last (or at least the most obvious) place where the valourized director is definitively held hostage by the lowly writer. Iñárritu demonstrated with his devastating episode for the anthology 11’09’’01—September 11 (2002) how his knowledge of how sound and editing can transform real-life horror into even more heightened and terrible forms—a double-edged sword he wielded with both force and responsibility. But hitching his wagon to screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga after the success of Amores perros (2000), Iñárritu has been subject to the latter’s mechanical contrivances, artless and pointless employment of time shifts, and the faith that if one tosses in just the right quantities of guns, dope, twat shots, and endangered children, one’s seriousness and honesty will be self-evident.

The Perros formula, yielding diminishing returns in 21 Grams (2003) and impasted over what should have been the stark and clear movement of the inexplicably acclaimed The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) has been carried to its logical culmination in Babel—if only it would culminate. But like any genre, Arriaga’s bag of tricks can be opened again and again. If connections themselves are all that matter, are their own meaning regardless of the actions performed and meanings created in the points they connect, then any given set of actions and locations are equally valid. Japan, Morocco, Mexico, and the southwestern US this time out could be Paraguay, Antarctica, the Lower Hebrides, and the whole of the Pacific Rim in the next. And as Iñárritu’s stock has now risen enough that he can attract Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Kurosawa Kiyoshi regular Yakusho Kôji, and everybody’s regular Gael Garcia Bernal, the two could well turn out these globetrotting international all-star spectaculars ad infinitum, ever grander arthouse versions of Around the World in 80 Days.

Of course, seriousness and honesty being the watchword here, the stars must share their screen time with a liberal helping of non-actors. The fallacy here is an old one. “Non-actor” is only a professional designation; when these people are in narrative films, even one which is patterned upon what may be their own daily reality, they cannot transform narrative falsities any more than their higher-paid co-stars. But like everything about Babel, the presence of these people within the film is more important than anything they actually do in it. They’re advance copy, automatic signifiers of the film’s gritty authenticity, just as the trisected storyline denotes complexity and the interlocking of those sections profundity. Babel is presold on all counts, a package tour of what passes for international art cinema to the Friday night moviegoer.

Tourism is, indeed, the most apt metaphor for Babel’s narrative operations. Like all tourism, it thrives on the promise of the exotic: only the spacious and well-appointed American home (which would certainly look strange to an enormous number of Americans) is spared the flash-cutting Orientalist treatment accorded the other locations. (Crazy Japanese TV! Crazy Mexican street life! Crazy Moroccan goat herders!) Like all tourism, it promises a glimpse of unvarnished reality while leaving the spectator secure within his own sphere of knowledge and with a newfound sense of edification—an entirely self-satisfied edification, as if the reality “discovered” was a result of one’s own endeavours rather than something pre-existent and wholly uncaring of those who pass through it. It’s here that filmmaker and viewer narcissism meet: as the places and people onscreen are entirely subject to Arriaga’s machinations, their existence ends with the machine; while our gaze, linked to the all-seeing eye of Iñárritu’s continent-hopping and connection-forging camera, is the ultimate source of meaning. Babel’s aesthetics create a hierarchy even as it vaunts some hazy notion of universal equality.

This last is Iñárritu and Arriaga’s gravest sin, that which makes Babel’s general competency almost worse than the stupefying foolishness of Crash. The very act of placing these four stories together implies some form of equivalency between them, already a delicate proposition when cutting between rich Westerners and impoverished third worlders. But where Syriana offered the more palatable suggestion that the actions of the powerful and the less powerful affect each other in varying ways, a constantly shifting terrain of power relations, Iñárritu and Arriaga believe that by simply according each story equal intensity, they are all of equal importance.

Pain, mental and physical—which is what Iñárritu and Arriaga rely upon to supply their sensory jolts—certainly is universal, but if all one is interested in is its simultaneity, the specifics which will give each individual affliction its meaning and, perhaps, its purpose, is lost. One should always be hesitant to establish a relative scale of suffering, but Stephen Mirrione’s relentlessly associative editing forces the proclamation of some simple truths: the cries of a sexually frustrated, deaf-mute Japanese girl have nothing to do with the cries of shepherd boys being fired upon by police; the desperation of a stranded American tourist trying to care for his wounded wife in a remote mountain village has nothing to do with the desperation of a Mexican nanny trying to re-enter the US after illegally transporting her young charges to her son’s wedding.

The predictable irony of Babel is that as it spreads its reach ever farther across the world, it tells us ever less about what goes on outside our own selves. “We don’t want other worlds, we want mirrors,” wrote Stanislaw Lem in Solaris; in Babel’s case, we don’t even want other countries. If we are indeed all connected, if our experiences are part of some universal pattern, then there’s little reason to investigate what goes on around us, or far away. There are more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of in Iñárritu and Arriaga’s bastardized syncretism, and films that can speak of universals without leaving the very specific environs of Paris (Caché), Naples (Vento di terra), or Seraing (L’Enfant). Babel’s globetrotting is nothing but the rankest, bloated provincialism, all the more unfortunate in that Iñárritu and Arriaga, artistically adrift on their sea of international co-production dollars, no longer have a province, or a universe, to hail from.

—Andrew Tracy

Babel.

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