Babel (DVD, 2007)

Babel is a sprawling epic with several seemingly unrelated stories at its center, with interplay in language (including Spanish, Arabic, English, Japanese, and International Sign Language) within each creating breakdowns in communication as the title suggests.

1. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett are husband and wife vacationing in Morrocco, trying to patch up their marriage after the death of one of their children
2. The couple's nanny, unable to find a replacement sitter to care for the kids while she attends her son's wedding in Mexico, decides to take them with her.
3. A pair of young Moroccan brothers are given a high-powered rifle by their father to shoot jackals while they herd the family goats.
4. A deaf mute Japanese teenager struggles to come to terms with the internal pain caused by her mother's suicide, as well as her blossoming sexuality while encountering rejection at increasingly inappropriate proposals.

The movie is a dread and anxiety-riddled ride through humanity's stupid decisions, bad luck, carelessness, misunderstandings, and frustrations that lead to life-threatening situations. The stories strands are intercut and spread out across three continents, attempting to pinpoint the woes facing modern humanity and making an overstatement about how we're all connected despite divisions of geography, language, and culture. However, the results are so anxiety trodden and grim that the point seems lost at sea by the movie's end. Each story strand was dragged out to the extreme, laden with such apprehension that the viewer can only assume the worst in each unfolding situation. The tension was not based on the unexpectedness of each outcome but with this interminable stretching of both the story and the viewer's limits. It is this grim uncertainty that so many reviewers celebrate, that there is no tidying up the various stories in a comforting conclusion. Yes, it's interesting but only to a point. There is just too much babbling. The pacing in each story was too choppy at intervals, with unnecessary spectacles that induced boredom. (Several times I was tempted to just shut it off and watch "That 70's Show" reruns.) Given the huge build-up, rave reviews, and my own impression that here was a movie that was going to give me something to think about, I was totally disappointed in this film. The only pros that I could come away with were the perfomances, including Mohamed Akhzam as Anwar, the tour group translater who all but carries the American couple through their harrowing experience, and Santiago (Gael Garcia Bernal) as Amelia's nephew. There is no denying the ambition or scope of Babel; there's just something missing in the few hours of this film that reduces it from "great" to just "interesting".

PROS - Stellar cast with solid, believable performances; interesting concept.

CONS - Underlying theme lost in scope of film; patchy splicing; choppy pace; scenes needs ambitious editing.