A powerhouse of performances!

Four intertwined stories about cultural diversity, the (dis)ability to communicate, and human tragedy as a result of it.

The title of the film refers to the story in the Bible. Babel, which is Hebrew for means to confuse, is a tower in the process of making in order for people to try to reach heaven. As the work progresses, God becomes pissed off as he sees the tower as a symbol of infidelity and lack of respect, so he takes his revenge by making the people speak different languages and scatter them all over the Earth. In reality, it is just a fairy-tale explanation for why people speak different languages.

A boy accidentally shoots an American woman named Susan in the neck from the top of a mountain in Morocco, so her husband Bill has to go look for medical assistance in a nearby village. In Tokyo, Chieko, a deaf-mute daughter of an amateur hunter who sold his rifle to the Moroccan boy’s father becomes frustrated and agonized after too many boys reject her advances. In America, Amelia is watching over Susan and Bill’s children. She decides to bring them to Mexico for a wedding, but gets into trouble with the border police on the way back to San Diego.

The acting is very subtle and feels real. Pitt and Blanchett takes you completely by surprise, but it is the foreign actors that surprises the most; the deaf-mute girl in Japan, the shephard and his family in Morocco, and Amelia in America. Since the acting feels so real and we are moving from one human tragedy to the next with almost no good moments for these people, it becomes a bit depressing to watch at times, but this works in favour of what messages the movie is sending out.

“Babel” feels very disconnected and de-centralized, which perfectly underlines the main theme of the movie, what the lack of communication or understanding between humans and cultures leads to. The movie also gets you thinking about how many other wars and crisis has been caused by such a basic thing, how short humans have really evolved despite all their technology and knowledge, and also about how little humans really trust each other nowadays. “Babel” is such a complex movie that it sometimes can feel too much. It runs over two and a half hours, which is quite long by today’s standards, and is at times too intense for its own good. This movie is not for everyone, clearly the adult themes in the movie and the frequent use of subtitles will scare off some people, but Iñàrittu’s way of portraying human emotions by often using little dialogue and a lot of images is very rewarding for those who appreciate it.