(recorded from tv premiere)

Babel

Three stories set in three continents bound by a fateful shot fired by a Moroccan boy messing around in the mountains. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett are only a third of this game of unintended consequences, set by director Alejandro González-Iñárritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga.

Babel is the final part of the trilogy created by director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga following the excellent Amores Perros and 21 Grams. Like the two previous installments, Babel deals with the darker aspects of the human condition, interweaving various stories around a central theme. As its title suggests, Babel is a study of language and the confusion and mistrust caused by the inability to communicate. With its three central stories set in Morocco, Mexico and Japan, Babel shows how frustrations and problems with language are a global issue.

It's an absorbing topic. The same however cannot be said of Babel which, for nearly two and half hours, cuts from one despairing episode to the next. Inarritu and Arriaga offer a very bleak perspective of life. There is no respite from the unrelenting misery. Both are so insistent we get the point they offer nothing that might possibly detract from their purpose. The result is a hard one to stomach. Slow and serious aren't synonyms for good and Babel's laboured intensity should not unquestioningly be construed as profound.

The central story involves Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett), married parents of two young children who are attempting to overcome the recent death of a third child by vacationing in Morocco. Susan is shot in the shoulder when the coach she and Richard are traveling on is chosen as a random target by two young boys who are trying out a new high-powered rifle given to them by their goat-herding father. Back in California, Amerlia (Adriana Barraza), the Mexican nanny of Richard and Susan's children, is forced to take them across the border to Tijuana so she can attend her son's wedding. The third story involves a deaf-mute student Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) who's struggling to come to terms with her mother's suicide and the frustrations her disability imposes on her burgeoning sexuality.

All three stories are linked both by circumstance and theme to create a unifying motif. Inarritu's penchant for playing with time and jumping between the storylines has the effect of breaking tension rather than increasing it. Where Babel does succeed is showing how inadvertent actions can have devastating effects.

Pitt is admirably unglamorous as the distraught Richard, who frantically tries to deal with Moroccan bureaucracy to get help for his wife. Wastefully Blanchett is given little to do other than wince and Gael Garcia Bernal appears all too briefly as Amelia's wayward nephew. The striking Rinko Kikuchi, in a starkly vulnerable and brave performance, provides Babel with its emotional core, quite an achievement without words.

Inarritu is undoubtedly a gifted and impassioned director. The scope and ambition of Babel is to be applauded, but making it more concise and providing some coruscating moments by way of contrast would not have diluted its impact and would perhaps have made it more compelling.

Kevin Murphy