On Oct. 27, 2006, Paramount unveiled Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel in theaters following its premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May. The feature, starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael Garcia Bernal, was nominated for seven Oscars at the 79th Academy Awards, including best picture. It walked away with one win, in the original score category. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review is below:
Tense, relentless and difficult to watch at times, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel is an emotionally shattering drama in which a simple act of kindness leads to events that pierce our veneer of civilization and bring on the white noise of terror.
Iñárritu and screen writer Guillermo Arriaga involve six families, most of them not known to one another, in four countries on three continents in their story of random fate and the perils of being unable to communicate.
Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael Garcia Bernal give committed ensemble performances alongside seasoned character performers and nonactors as the story ranges from Morocco to San Diego to Tokyo.
The film, which also features exceptional work by director of photography Rodrigo Prieto, production designer Brigitte Broch, editors Stephen Mirrione and Douglas Crise and composer Gustavo Santaolalla, is headed for major prizes and large, appreciative audiences.
As with his previous films, Iñárritu tells his story using scenes out of order so that the pieces fall together in a jagged form that heightens the tension. It starts in the Moroccan desert, where a man buys a Winchester rifle from a neighbor to help keep the jackals away from his herd of goats. A Japanese hunter had gifted the neighbor with the rifle in gratitude for his work as a guide.
The rifle is entrusted to the goat herder’s two young sons, who end up firing it from a mountainside at a coach filled with Western tourists just to see how far the bullet would go.
The bullet, however, strikes an American named Susan (Blanchett) who is traveling with her husband Richard (Pitt) in attempt to patch up their marriage following the death of a child.
Four hours from the nearest hospital, the coach takes a detour to a remote village, where a local man offers shelter while the other tourists argue over whether to stay or leave.
Desperate, Richard phones the U.S. embassy pleading for help and also calls home in San Diego, where their longtime maid Amelia (Adriana Barraza) is caring for their other two children. With Susan bleeding and near death in the desert, he begs Amelia to remain with the kids as he tries to get help.
Amelia’s son, however, is getting married across the border and, having exhausted attempts to find another sitter, she decides to take the kids with her to the wedding in a car driven by her friendly but hot headed nephew Santiago (Bernal).
As Richard fights to keep Susan alive with the help of a wise and calm old Moroccan woman and a veterinarian, the shooting escalates into an international incident with security forces believing terrorists to be responsible and hunting for the perpetrators.
Meanwhile, in Tokyo, a young deaf-mute woman named Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) is grappling with the loss of her mother by suicide, fighting with her equally bereft father (Koji Yakusho) and trying to deal with the frustrations of adolescence.
The filmmakers succeed brilliantly in weaving these stories together, taking time to explore depth of character and relationships. The suspense builds throughout as everyone involved becomes lost in a place they don’t understand with people they don’t know if they can trust.
Several astonishing Tokyo sequences replicate what it might be like to be deaf-mute, and equal imagination is applied to scenes at night in the wasteland of the Mexico-California border and the barren mountains of Morocco. — Ray Bennett, originally published on May 24, 2006.