Slippings of Tongues

Babel. Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael García Bernal,
Mustapha Amhita, and Adriana Barraza star in a film written by
Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga and directed by
Iñárritu.

Reviewed by Josef Woodard

With Babel, the visionary Mexican director Alejandro González
Iñárritu continues on his noble quest to affectively use the film
medium to check humanity’s pulse. If that ambition sounds overly
grand, it is, and he sometimes steps over the line of credibility
in the process, but ultimately wins us over with his message of
hope amid the rubble of our fragmented contemporary world.

Babel is the third installment of a trilogy, preceded by Amores
Perros (his masterpiece, so far) and 21 Grams; clearly Iñárritu has
honed his style of montage and the narrative cross-stitch between
stories to a high degree. This time around, an accidental shooting
of an American tourist in a stretch of desert in Tunisia triggers a
wild ride of accusations and ripples across the world: west
(Southern California and Mexico) and east (Tokyo) and forward and
backward in time. In multiple languages and with locations in
Morocco, Tokyo, and Mexico, Babel willfully attempts to crisscross
the globe in an effort to show how surprisingly connected the
world’s peoples are.