Review of Babel (2006) by Matthew H — 29 Apr 2016

Babel is the third and final chapter in Alejandro G. Iñárritu's loose trilogy of films with interlocking stories and characters and while I haven't yet seen the previous two; I do hope they're not as pretentious and plodding as this film is.

The film follows four separate tales of misfortune starting with two children in Morocco who randomly shoot at a bus and injure an American woman played by Cate Blanchett, whose husband, played by Brad Pitt has to then contact his Mexican nanny to take care of his children while he helps his wife, and then we meet a deaf/mute, Japanese teenager whose father technically got the entire ball rolling, but it honestly doesn't connect much more than that.

This film clearly had good intentions and you can see the craftsmanship behind the camera, but its story is told so slowly and most of the characters are either unlikable or make the stupidest decisions possible, that it becomes hard to care about these people at all.

The best (and strangely least connected) story about the oppressed, deaf/mute teenager in Japan breathes a bit of life into the proceedings and the direction of her scenes is flawless, but it too, also becomes one-note after a while.

The film is acted well by everyone involved and it is by no means a "bad" movie, but it's a bit forgettable once all is said and done and it doesn't have as much to say about society as it thinks it does; the grim portrait it paints of the world uses VERY broad strokes.