Pitt, Blanchett: Worth a thousand words

Los Angeles, Oct. 25 (Reuters): If a picture truly is worth a thousand words, then movie audiences should easily be able to grasp the challenging story in Babel even though it is told in Arabic, English, Spanish, Japanese and even sign language.

Babel, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, debuts in US theatres on Friday with a global tale of how languages and cultural traditions divide people more than distance or personal ideologies. It expands nationwide in coming weeks.

“The most difficult challenge in this film ... was to get rid of text and find how to translate these words — and in this case three continents, five languages and four stories, all these diverse elements — into one, single visual language,” said Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

Apparently, he was up to the challenge. Inarritu won the best director’s trophy at the Cannes film festival in May, and Babel is earning wide praise from critics and industry watchers who put it high on this year’s list of must-see Oscar hopefuls.

Babel interweaves four stories. Moroccan boys take their father’s rifle to practice shooting. Two US tourists (Blanchett and Pitt) are victims of an errant bullet from the rifle. In San Diego, problems arise when a Mexican nanny takes the Americans’ kids across the border and in Tokyo, a deaf teenager copes in dangerous ways with the death of her mom.

The film utilises four small, personal stories about husbands, wives, fathers, mothers and children to comment on a big, global problem of how a lack of understanding and respect for different people and cultures can spark violence.

Babel challenges audiences intellectually, yet Inarritu has simplified the delivery of the movie’s themes by using personal stories to which audiences can relate.

“I didn’t want this film to be a judge or a preacher. I wanted it to be subtle and (have) compassion even for the policemen and institutions,” Inarritu said.