Demob Happy

Four-story tower of Babel

7/10

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest film follows in the footsteps of his previous works Amores Perros and, significantly, 21 Grams. It mirrors the latter film’s fundamental contrivance by interweaving several seemingly disparate stories operating on different timescales and, in this film, time zones. This is becoming almost a clichéd mini-genre in itself now that Hollywood has joined the bandwagon with the Academy-approved, massively overrated Crash. Other, superior reference points include Syriana, Traffic, Magnolia and Robert Altman’s forgotten classic Short Cuts.

Set in the US, Mexico, Morrocco and Japan, it is indulgent in its use of setting and atmosphere, but the stories linking these together thematically and situationally are tenuous at best. The story that takes place in Tokyo concerning a wayward deaf-mute Japanese girl and her father coming to terms with the death of her mother is engaging in itself but is connected to the other principle stories in an almost laughably contrived way (which I won’t ’spoil’ by disclosing here). On a thematic level it is connected to the rest of the film in that it concerns people dealing with grief and loss - and its different modern cultural manifestations. This theme is also central to the film’s weakest plot, which revolves around Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchet’s near-fatal trip to Morocco to resolve marital differences provoked by the death of their child. However their portrayal is so unsympathetic and one-dimensional that the presence of the two famous actors feels like something of an intrusion.

It could be argued that Iñárritu brings together these disperate narratives simply because he hasn’t the imagination to sustain one single story into a full-length picture. Whereas there is merit in this argument, Babel engages best in its jarring contrasts of location and atmosphere, from the stark desert poverty of Southern Morocco to the concrete and neon of Tokyo. Coupled with the fantastic wedding party in Mexico, there are moments of levity and optimism that make this film less heavy-handed than 21 Grams, even if it doen’t successfully marry its diverse strands as successfully. You may not relate to some of the extreme emotions along the way, but this is nevertheless compassionate and creative filmmaking and well-worth watching.