On "Babel"

Too long for a tweet so I’ll put it here in my aptly titled blog. In reply to this:

Whoa… This movie is whackadoo, but great! http://bit.ly/gKSQei (via @GetGlue) #Babel — @malidragon

Babel is one of my top-5-EVER films. I’ve seen it about four times and it, like all good art, reveals more of itself each time. It touches on many important themes with passion and intelligence — debates over immigration law, post-9/11 US foreign policy, grief and loss — but most central to the film is the theme hinted at by its title: communication, and the difficulty we have making ourselves understood.

All the major plotlines use language (spoken and otherwise) as a signifier to the true conflict underlying its characters’ situations. Watching for dialog and interaction, ask yourself whether the characters in a given scene are understanding each other or not, and what that means for the story. The effect is very subtle, very deliberate and just awe-inspiring in its execution. For example, contrast how the nanny speaks to the kids in Spanish and they reply in English, yet understand each other perfectly; versus their parents who talk at each other in So-Cal Sophisticate English without any actual communication until the climactic (UTTERLY HEARTRENDING BTW) scene.

The message is something about how real understanding, true communication, is incredibly hard, and seems to get harder the closer we are to the person we’re trying to communicate with. Cheiko and her father, already hampered by her deafness and his distance, are completely unable to help each other with their shared grief. So too are Richard and Susan until the tragedy puts them in extremis and they have no choice but to confront the gaping hole they’ve been patching around for the past year.

This thread of language, more than the chain of events, is what ties the plotlines together and gives the film its power.

(one technical note too: future directors who want to do disjoint time sequences should take a lesson from Iñárritu. Listen carefully to the phone call at the beginning of Amelia’s sequence. We know from the beginning that Susan will be OK. Masterful.)