Babel (2006)

France / USA / Mexico, 143 minutes
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Writers: Guillermo Arriaga, Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Photography: Rodrigo Prieto
Music: Gustavo Santaolalla
Editors: Douglas Crise, Stephen Mirrione
Cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael Garcia Bernal, Koji Yakusho, Adriana Barraza, Rinko Kikuchi, Elle Fanning

I'm never going to knock director and cowriter Alejandro González Iñárritu for ambition. He thinks big, he dreams big, and it's always about making the big overpowering cinematic gesture, impact, weaving narrative structures, kinetic visuals, and explosive action intuitively across complex stories. Babel, as usual, has a few storylines, and even a number of separate time streams. In the end it's mostly a familiar lament about the geography of our shrinking interconnected world, with more communication but less communicating (or vice versa, I'm sure). See also the Bible story that supplies the title. Well, that's Iñárritu for you. Babel takes the guise of the "for want of a nail" tale, otherwise known as the "butterfly effect" in chaos theory. One thing leads to another and if it weren't for that one thing there wouldn't be all these others.

I've straightened Babel all out for you and I'll give you the spine of it straight, and then we can get to the details, which is where this movie is most alive and worth seeing: A wealthy Japanese man, after a big-game hunting trip, gives his Moroccan guide a highly powerful and accurate rifle as a kind of tip. The guide sells the rifle to his neighbor who needs a way to get rid of the jackals that are preying on his goats. Of the neighbor's two sons, the youngest is a natural sharpshooter, but there is sibling rivalry between the two. Out hunting jackals one day the boys want to see how far the rifle can shoot—they have been told three kilometers. Sibling rivalry happens and the youngest boy shoots at a tour bus some good distance away from their mountain perch. As it happens he plugs Cate Blanchett as Susan Jones right in the neck. She's hate-traveling with Brad Pitt as her husband Richard, trying to patch up a faltering marriage. They have the glow of Americanness about them. The situation—immediately taken as terrorism, of course—also means, back in their San Diego home, that no one can be found to take care of their kids so that their long-time trusted housekeeper can attend her son's wedding in Mexico. So she decides to take the kids with her. Crossing into Mexico with those kids and her ne'er-do-well nephew (Gael Garcia Bernal) is one of the best scenes in the movie. You somehow know nothing good is going to come of it. The foreboding is overwhelming.

21 Grams (2003)

USA, 124 minutes
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Writer: Guillermo Arriaga
Photography: Rodrigo Prieto
Music: Gustavo Santaolalla
Editor: Stephen Mirrione
Cast: Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Naomi Watts, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Melissa Leo, Clea DuVall, Danny Huston, Paul Calderon

One more prestige production of the past with the prestige season of the present still (barely) upon us. 21 Grams is the kind of edgy upscale downbeat over-the-top melodrama/acting showcase that seems to put in an appearance most years one way or another, often indeed with Sean Penn in the cast—one thinks of Dead Man Walking or Mystic River, for example. Perhaps Silver Linings Playbook occupied the niche this year, though that did not seem to me generally quite as glum as many of these others, which often go to such formal narrative extremes to wring the ducts (Monster's Ball, Things We Lost in the Fire, you know what I'm talking about).

Certainly one sees similarities in terms of how 21 Grams has been put together. First and most obviously there is the big-name mainstream commercial acting talent, self-evidently "stretching": Sean Penn (who can make even running in place look like stretching), Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro—the latter two arguably at their peaks of popularity. Then there is the promising young director element, in this case Alejandro González Iñárritu, which is how I came to be gulled in. I thought his feature debut from 2000, Amores Perros, was shaggy and barely held together, but dazzled with ambition and creative energy. It seemed promising even to me to throw him in with Del Toro, Penn, and Watts, for a complicated story about lost souls in the modern world, miracles of medical science, the ways we insist on living, alienation, drugs and sex, redemption by fertility, cruel auto accidents, tortured Christianity, etc. Trauma and grief, in other words, we got 'em. Also spoilers, on the other side of the jump, big time (though here's the biggest spoiler of all: none of the narrative surprises are particularly surprising).

Amores Perros (2000)

Amores perros, Mexico, 154 minutes
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Writer: Guillermo Arriaga
Photography: Rodrigo Prieto
Music: Gustavo Santaolalla
Editors: Luis Carballar, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Fernando Perez Unda
Cast: Emilio Echevarría, Gael García Bernal, Goya Toledo, Álvaro Guerrero, Vanessa Bauche, Jorge Salinas, Marco Pérez, Rodrigo Murray, Humberto Busto

Amores Perros is a picture overflowing, by design, with dogs—mean dogs, righteous dogs, killer dogs, foo-foo dogs, dogs that run in packs. Even the title, which is translated in the subtitles as "life's a bitch," makes the element explicit and incidentally gives away the theme plain. As downbeat as it is dazzling—you do not come away from this with a glow, but you are likely to be impressed—it mixes up three stories of six people, each pair unaware of the other two, all equally involved in sin on the level of flouting the 10 Commandments—adultery, covetousness, murder, and so on. It all adds up to a shaggy dog story (pun probably not intended), which sprawls untidily across the screen in great bolts and washes of energy, riveting from start to finish.

It opens plunged in media res into circumstances leading up to the central event of the picture, which serves (imperfectly) as the unifying point around which everything else revolves: an auto accident that kills one, injures another, and enables one of the most supernaturally unsettling dogs on film, a creature named Cofi, to escape and live another day. If the overall structure is a bit rickety, and it is, with peculiar narrative lacunae and a way of moving from scene to scene that is not graceful or elegant, but rather base and urgent—yet at the same time often quite beautiful—it somehow manages to cohere into something very big, its various parts distorting and swelling up and force-fitting themselves to one another to make it work.