By Armond White

Babel 

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu 

All those who were smart enough to avoid Syriana and The Constant Gardener should brace themselves for another wave of nauseating political arrogance in Babel. The title suggests that the world hosts so many different languages it prevents nations and cultures from understanding each other, but writer/director Alejándro González Iñárritu isn’t that magnanimous. It’s clear from the opening scene in which a Muslim goat-herder barters over a rifle with another Muslim goat-herder that—somehow—we’re in for a lesson about the American embargo on brotherhood, the United States’ interference with world communication. Iñárritu patronizes those goat-herders for having Western violence brought into their peaceable rural midsts. Iñárritu further suggests that it’s a case of the goats coming home to roost when two mountain farmboys use that rifle to accidentally shoot a rich American (Cate Blanchett) who is unaccountably touring Morocco with her husband (Brad Pitt). 

It’s a weird sensation to watch an American-financed movie that condemns U.S. culture and the people who produced it, yet intends those same suckers to watch it. Babel pulls this seditious stunt through Iñárritu’s narrative tricks. Naive viewers can pretend this movie isn’t the slap-in-the-face it is by fawning over its fancy editing. (The jury at this year’s Cannes Film Festival knew the real deal; rather than recognizing art, it gave Iñárritu the Best Director prize for following the Yankee-Go-Home-footsteps of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.)

As usual, the director of Amores Perros and 21 Grams badly cobbles together a handful of stories instead of telling one story well. Babel’s intertwined plots feature four languages: Arabic (for the target-practicing Moroccan teens); Spanish (for the illegal immigrant maid who loses Blanchett and Pitt’s white, blond children in the Mexican desert); Japanese (for the deaf mute Tokyo teenager abandoned by her suicidal mother and her distant businessman father who is responsible for that rifle getting into the wrong hands); and English (for the stupid American tourists who, typically, were in the wrong place at the wrong time). Babel is a Traffic jam.

Iñárritu’s plots converge in an accusation of American guilt. Pitt, like George Clooney, is one of those “informed” actors who thinks he’s making an important statement by blaming the United States for the world’s ills. The press feels obligated to praise such impertinence, but I think any sensible viewer will come away from Babel with the depressing realization that they’ve just watched almost three hours of global stupidity. Each character takes a bad situation and makes it worse: teens shooting it out with police, a maid leaving children marooned in hostile environments, a girl debasing herself sexually and, finally, Pitt and Blanchett going through a pinhead reenactment of The Sheltering Sky. It all becomes an orgy of anti-American sentiment. 

Despite the foolish behavior of these Moroccan, Japanese and Mexican characters, Iñárritu’s point is that America is really a terrible, imperialist country (border guards won’t even let the irresponsible maid back into the country). Hal Hartley’s omnibus movie Flirt was better than this, partly because it had no post-9/11 cynicism. 

Iñárritu confuses his characters’ personal problems with American foreign policy and then gets artsy: the silent Tokyo disco scenes, where the sound drops out for the deaf girl, begs our pity when, actually, an emphasis on flashing lights and vibrations should be enough to convey the deaf girl’s disorientation. Iñárritu prefers a “dark” vision, but Babel could as easily have shown a world of good, humanitarian deeds. Instead, Iñárritu offers a chicly nihilistic ending, with a final shot of a lonely nude child on an urban balcony. This babe-in-the-woods sentimentality isn’t profound; it’s mawkish. Babel is Crash for hipsters.