Babel (2006)

If I had been allowed to pick the Best Picture of 2006 from the list of nominees, I think I would have probably picked Babel. This is an impressive film in many ways, not the least of which is the scale of the story. A small incident of a woman being accidentally shot in Morocco sets off a series of interconnected events throughout the world. You have to admire the talents of the screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu for achieving such a vision as this. I do understand that many people felt that Babel covered much of the same territory as Crash, the winner of the Oscar for Best Picture the previous year, particularly the idea that our lives are all in some way connected. However, Babel is a substantially greater film than Crash.

I'll try to make the links briefly between the various stories that unfurl in this movie. The American couple in Morocco (played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) spend some harrowing times in a small village after she is shot and they are both abandoned by the rest of their tour bus. The shooters, two young boys who live with their family isolated among the desert, face the consequences of their actions. The housekeeper charged with the care of the American couple's children decides to take the children with her to Mexico to attend her son's wedding. And a hearing-impaired Japanese girl, still trying to cope with her mother's suicide, misunderstands the intentions of the police who want to question her father, a former owner of the gun that was used in the shooting.

This is very emotional material, and each of the stories is grim and tragic. The performers are all first rate, worthy of the challenges the script confronts them with. I'd single out Adriana Barraza as Amelia, the housekeeper whose life seems to spiral out of control as the film progresses. One horrible accident of fate after another befalls her. Her interrogation scene is one of the most heartwrenching moments in this movie. She is ably supported in most of her scenes by Gael Garcia Bernal as her nephew. The actress who plays the Japanese daughter is Rinko Kikuchi, and she is amazing in a non-speaking part here. There are several moments in the film where you are allowed to experience events the way that she does, particularly her entrance to a nightclub. It's a trick by the filmmakers that could have failed in the wrong hands, but Kikuchi's expressive face draws viewers in. The actor Koji Yakusho plays her father with such a degree of honesty; you can sense how much he too has lost with his wife's death and how little he seems to understand his daughter.

Of course, a complex film like this does require one's attention, and the ability to handle multiple plot lines, especially when they are not all resolved in some sort of happy way, seems to be lost among most moviegoers today. Yet if you watch this film and pay attention, if you are willing to invest the time, you are substantially rewarded. We can't expect a film to teach us all we need to know about people of different cultures or how we are linked to each other in ways we could not have contemplated, but a pat resolution shouldn't be the goal of every movie. That's what makes Babel stand out and above most of the films being made these days.