Crash

Babel

Directed by Alejandro Iñarritu

To harsher critics, Babel might seem like just that. Mexican director Alejandro Iñarritu’s new film takes to an extreme the jumbled recipe of films like Traffic and Crash: loosely-connected storylines swirling around heavy social issues, painted in epic brushstrokes. As with his earlier Amores Perros and 21 Grams, Iñarritu adds to this his butterfly-effect existentialism, by which whatever thing happens here will end up changing the world over there. In this case, the here and there are Morocco, Tokyo and the border between the US and Mexico (each shot on location, remarkably). While only one is a literal boundary, Babel tells us that unseen borders threaten to divide us everywhere – from those people we don’t know, those we know best and even from ourselves.

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, who play an emotionally-estranged couple on an African vacation, wear no makeup as they struggle through their own calamity, a choice that matches Iñarritu’s love of close-ups and gritty, high-contrast images of alien locales. Except for the scenes in Tokyo, the film’s most moving portion, Iñarritu’s style almost threatens to distract from the movie itself.

Though the chaos it portrays may seem bewildering and overwhelming, the movie seems to be saying that confusion is inevitable. Even if they speak the same language, people don’t hear each other, and that slightest disconnection can unleash anarchy upon the world. Alex Pasternack