I had blogged about “Babel” earlier but am returning to the subject because of Michael Wood’s review of the film which intelligently focuses on two related aspects–the multiple plots and the non-linear narrative. Wood was initially sceptical of both features; they suggested a formulaic, familiar tic on the part of the film-makers; but he goes on to say that “Babel” succeeded in doing something new and more convincing. Here’s an excerpt:

Like Arriaga’s and González Iñárritu’s earlier movies, Babel is full of negative suspense: we are not waiting for something to happen, we just hope (hopelessly) that nothing will. Or: there are so many terrible possibilities, we don’t care which of them doesn’t come off. But there is something new here, a longer, slower development of story, where each life gets it due, and doesn’t have to be compared to another life to become interesting.
This mood is very well brought out by the tricky timeline itself – an unexpected benefit of the combination of a repeated recipe and real imaginative talent. Early in the movie there is a telephone call from the father of the children Amelia is looking after. He talks to her about the plan for relieving her so that she can go to the wedding; he talks to Mike, the older of the two children. Right at the end of the movie we see and hear the phone call from the father’s end, and we realise that after all we and the characters have been through, after the shooting and dying in Morocco, the despair in Japan and the horrible end to the wedding adventure in Mexico, these have not been simultaneous stories, and that one of them, at least, hasn’t started yet. The writer’s and director’s continuing interest in accident has turned into something else, or perhaps was always tending towards something else: not worlds of sheer harm and disaster, but the sense that we are always about to step into an aftermath we can’t imagine.

This is a rich and suggestive review but not wholly persuasive. For Wood, what successfully breaks the rhythm of cross-cutting and helps the film discover its “real energies” is a scene in the Japanese night-club. Please go to his review and read his wonderful take on it. But, at least for me, that scene, exciting and disquieting as it was, never achieved the disruptive force of a later sequence, the one showing the Mexican nanny lost in the desert, trying to save the gringo children who are in her charge and whom she clearly loves. And the broken timeline finds its effective force here because when a scene is repeated from another end, the scene that Wood describes in the excerpt above, we realize that the worst is yet to come even though we have just witnessed it. Isn’t that how we experience the fate of others in this divided-and-yet-connected moment of globalization?

P.S. My students in one class are reading John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath.” What is the critical purchase of the timeline in “Babel” when we contrast it with Steinbeck’s linear narrative of secular creation?

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