Last call: Brad Pitt fails to communicate in the Alejandro González Iñárritu film Babel. (Paramount Vantage)
It is no small feat to make Brad Pitt look like just another guy, but in Babel, he is just one more link in a globe-circling chain of damaged people struggling to find a common tongue. This ambitious, colossal effort from Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga (the gifted partners who made Amores Perros and 21 Grams) follows the unforeseen effects of a gun left by a tourist in a foreign country. Pitt and Cate Blanchett play an American couple who stumble into random violence in Morocco while, back in San Diego, their well-meaning Mexican nanny (Adriana Barraza) takes her tow-headed charges into Tijuana for a wedding. Zigzag to Japan, where a deaf teenage girl (Rinko Kikuchi) is mixing an explosive cocktail of sex and sadness. No snakes or slashers come close to loosing the visceral sickness that watching children in peril inspires; this is a true horror movie, but the source of terror is the different currency of dead, wounded and abandoned children around the world. While sometimes it is all just too much, overreaching is about the best kind of filmmaking flaw. Even when he’s dropping a few threads, Iñárritu may be the most emotionally bold filmmaker working today.
Babel screens Sept. 9 and 10 at TIFF.
Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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