Summary
Tijuana. Amelia's son gets married and the crowd erupts in massive applause and cheering. We see Debbie and Mike at a table at the wedding, having a great time as the band plays. The bride and groom kiss on the dance floor.
They call Amelia to the dance floor and she hugs her son and dances with him. The party continues. Debbie dances with Santiago and a man asks Amelia for a dance. When Amelia questions him about his wife, he tells her that his wife died 10 years prior and they dance.
We see the man embracing and kissing Amelia in the house, as gentle guitar music plays. Debbie and Mike play outside with the other children. Suddenly, Santiago shoots a gun in the air and the Jones children look frightened. Santiago is visibly drunk and flirts with the bride, a gun tucked into his pants.
Morocco. We hear a new story about the shooting as the newscaster says, "terrorist cells have been eradicated in our country and one act of vulgar banditry followed by superficial evaluations the U.S. places upon it cannot ruin our image or the economy."
Susan gasps in pain on the floor of the house and asks to talk to their children, but Richard calms her down. As the old woman lights up something to smoke, Susan looks at her, scared. The woman invites Susan to smoke it and she does.
We see the European tourists on the bus complaining about the heat on the bus and the fact that they will not turn on the air conditioning. One of the men gets off the bus and goes to Richard to tell him they have to leave. Richard begs them to stay, and the man tells him they will wait 30 minutes.
Tokyo. Chieko and her friend walk through the city and meet up with some other teenagers. She sees a cute boy, who is one of her friends' cousins. He is not a deaf-mute, but he understands a little. He walks towards Chieko and asks her name, which she writes on her hand. He introduces himself as Haruki and hands her a bottle of whiskey, from which she takes a swig.
He then takes out some pills and puts one in each of their hands. Chieko swallows it and takes another swig of whiskey. The teenagers horseplay with one another as the pills begins to kick in. Chieko gets on a swing and swings with a joyful expression. They all go in the nearby fountain, splashing each other.
Afterwards, the teenagers go to a club and dance as "September" by Earth, Wind, and Fire plays. One moment we are in the sonic landscape of the club, and in the next the sound disappears, as we are aligned with Chieko's experience of the club as a deaf person. The perspective shifts between silence and the music of the club as the teens dance.
Suddenly, Chieko looks over and sees her friend kissing the boy she has a crush on and her face falls. She waves to her friend and leaves the dance floor sadly. She walks down the street weeping past a band that is playing music that she cannot hear. Eventually she arrives home and goes to the doorman, writing a note to him and presenting him with the card the cops gave her. "Are you sure you want him to come now?" the doorman asks, and she nods.
The doorman calls the detective, Mamiya, and asks him to come over to talk about her father.
In Morocco, Abdullah yells at Ahmed and Yussef about their crime, hitting them when they will not tell him why they shot someone. Ahmed then tells their father that Yussef looked at Zohra naked many times. Abdullah hits the boys and asks where the rifle is.
We then see Hassan getting questioned by the police. He tells them that a Japanese hunter gave him the rifle and that he has a picture of the hunter, sending his wife to get the picture. The policemen examine the picture of the hunter, who appears to be Chieko's father.
Ahmed fetches the rifle for Abdullah, who plans to take the boys to someone's house. He tells the women to tell the cops that they went south. We see the cops taking Hassan's wife in the car, asking her to bring them to Abdullah's house. As they drive down the road, they spot Abdullah and his two sons fleeing and begin to shoot at them. Abdullah, Yussef, and Ahmed hide behind the rocks, but when Ahmed tries to run, he gets shot. Yussef grabs the rifle and begins shooting at the cops, hitting one.
In Tijuana, Amelia and Santiago get in the car to bring the children back to San Diego. The groom tells Santiago he is too drunk, but Santiago does not listen and says "I'll be right back." Amelia tells the bride that the children have soccer practice the next morning and need to be taken home, before saying her goodbyes. As they leave, the groom tells Santiago, "Remember, they got you once already and you got in a lot of trouble."
As they drive to the border, Santiago is visibly drunk, almost falling asleep behind the wheel. They are met by a border patrol guard who is skeptical of their situation, and wants to know who the children asleep in the back of the car are. Amelia hands the guard the children's passports and he tells them to wait for a moment. Another guard comes out with a flashlight and asks to look in the trunk. They find nothing and then ask to look in Amelia's purse, shining their flashlights all the while.
Analysis
The film moves suddenly between moments of culture clash and moments of integration between cultures. One moment we see Richard and Susan enduring the trauma of a near-death experience in an unknown country with less infrastructure, and in the next we see their children cheering along with the band at a Mexican wedding. Iñárritu neither sentimentalizes nor stigmatizes cultural confrontation, but attempts to show it in all its complexity.
It is this sensitivity and lack of moral determinacy that adds to the realism of the film. The themes of Babel—the moral costs of xenophobia, the effects of socioeconomic disparity, and the interconnectedness of human experience—are revealed slowly and deftly, as Iñárritu zooms in on smaller vignettes to reveal larger truths. His method is not to show the viewer that these facets of the human experience are simple, but to continually unfold complicated scenarios. This attention to detail and subtlety is what makes the film feel so true to life, in spite of it being a fiction.
The menace of gun violence looms in several of the storylines in subtle ways. In the story in Morocco, we see how a rifle, in the hands of a young boy, can change from a toy into a weapon of destruction. Then, at the wedding, we see a pistol tucked into Santiago's waistband, and when he shoots it into the sky, Debbie and Mike look worried. Guns are a first-world invention, but we see the ways that their use scares and shocks the most first-world characters in the film, and the ways guns represent a perceived barbarism inherent in the "developing world."
Iñárritu shoots both close-ups of actors and wide urban landscapes with care and detail. In this way, he shows the way that the personal experiences of the characters are part of a larger universal whole. This style is on full display in both the wedding scene in Tijuana and the drug journey scene in Tokyo. In montage, he shoots close-ups of characters' faces as they experience the ecstasy of party-going and drugs. Then he will follow up these more intimate shots with wide shots of the whole wedding, or a shot from above of the bustling streets of Tokyo.
The story of Yussef and Ahmed is a tragic one, and we see the ways that their foolish indiscretion has horrible consequences. When it is revealed that they are the ones who shot at the bus, the cops go on the hunt for them, shooting them before they have had a chance to bring the children in for any kind of questioning. The image of Yussef, a preadolescent boy, shooting at the cops with a rifle that somehow made its way into his hands is an arresting one, highlighting the injustice of his situation and his treatment under the law.
