Never one to tell a straightforward story straightforwardly, the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (“21 Grams,” “Amores Perros”) thrives on complications and fractured narratives. His third feature, “Babel,” offers plenty more of the same.
Working once again with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (who also wrote “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada”), Inarritu has constructed an intricate puzzle movie that takes some wild leaps off the diving board and mostly justifies the gamble. If the experiment goes on too long (143 minutes), and if one of the stories is less than compelling, “Babel” still has many glorious touches.
Chief among them is the way two stories intersect in Morocco. A pair of American tourists (Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett) are quarreling about why they’ve chosen to visit the country and leave their children to their Hispanic housekeeper. Unknown to them, she’s taken the kids from San Diego to Mexico to celebrate her son’s wedding.
Meanwhile, two young Moroccan goatherders are trying out their new gun in a sparsely populated desert area. One takes aim at the Americans’ tourist bus, not meaning to do much more than establish the gun’s range, but the bullet shatters a window and hits Blanchett, and in no time the incident has set off a terrorist alert.
Meanwhile, back in Tokyo (yes, that’s quite a leap, and it’s not one of the more welcome ones), a deaf-mute teenager (Rinko Kikuchi) is dealing with her mother’s suicide and her father’s apparent estrangement from her. She acts out her trauma by stripping for strangers and teasing a boy who seems to reject her.
As it turns out, there is a direct connection between the folks in Japan and the ones in Morocco, but too many coincidences create a strain on the storyline. Also too much is the housekeeper’s desperate border crossing. How much trouble can one family attract in one weekend? This one seems downright disaster-prone.
Nevertheless, Inarritu does succeed in creating a compelling and unnerving sense of dislocation, by presenting several points of view, and several perceptions of the consequences, almost simultaneously. Essential to this effect are the contributions of composer Gustavo Santaolalla and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (reunited after their work on “Brokeback Mountain”).
The privileged tourists see one kind of crisis; the Moroccans see quite another. The tourist may lose his wife and children; the goatherd family and the housekeeper may lose everything. Class, race, religion and income make all the difference in how their worlds, separate yet the same, are perceived. Acting on their own interpretation of the situation, officials immediately interpret the accident as part of a conspiracy.
“When Worlds Collide” might have been a more appropriate title for “Babel,” which is especially effective in blending well-known actors with unknowns. Pitt and Blanchette, both deglamourized, are never really the stars.
Neither is Gael Garcia Bernal, who has a key role as the housekeeper’s impatient nephew in the Mexican sequence, or Kikuchi, a 24-year-old actress who successfully impersonates a character who’s nearly a decade younger. They’re all supporting players in a story that’s much bigger and more complicated than any of them.