Four families become partially intertwined in a series of tragedies in “Babel” (2006). Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu had just become a big-deal filmmaker and appears to have been given full artistic freedom to do something that completely went over my head. It’s pornographically sad, as one bad decision leads to the next until the ripples reach around the globe. Ultimately, however, there’s no coherent story pulling it all together. Inarritu tosses a bunch of partially developed thoughts into a blender and lazily jumps backward and forward in time. The noise it makes is like – oh, I see what he did there.
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I presume Alejandro González Iñárritu was trying to make an artistic statement about the randomness of life by scrambling the timeline in “21 Grams” (2003), but it just didn’t work for me. Maybe it was punishment for my habit of trying to guess what’s going to happen next – it’s hard when next isn’t really next. Usually these kinds of movies sort themselves out and you can catch on. But in this unsatisfying rendition, where three families cross paths at a tragically metaphorical intersection, I was still stuck at the stoplight, blinker on, trying to figure out which way to turn.
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