Summary
The original border patrol agent comes out and tells Amelia that she needs written permission from Mike and Debbie's parents. She goes through her bag, but she doesn't have anything. As Debbie wakes up, the agent asks her if Amelia is her aunt, and when she tells him she is not, he asks Santiago if he is drunk and asks him to get out of the car.
As another car pulls up behind him, the agent tells Santiago to park his car in a space, but at the last minute, Santiago drives away, stepping on the gas. The kids cry in the backseat as Amelia pleads with Santiago to stop. He speeds down the road and Mike and Debbie sob in the back. When Santiago spots the police lights in the rearview mirror, he drives down a dirt road in the dark.
Santiago stops the car and tells Amelia to get out with Debbie and Mike. He tells them he will go and lose the cops, then come back for them, as Amelia grabs a flashlight from the glove compartment. They get out of the car and Santiago drives away. As they wander through the desert, the children weep and beg to be taken home.
In Morocco, Richard looks at Susan as she sleeps. A man prays nearby. Later, a young girl arrives with tea for Richard. Richard asks the man if the girl is his daughter and the man tells him she's his third of five, before asking Richard if he has kids. Richard pulls out a picture of them from his wallet and shows it to the man. "How many wives you have?" Richard asks, and the man laughs and tells him he can only afford one.
When a government official arrives and tells Richard that the ambulance isn't coming, he is incensed. The officer tells him that the American embassy wants to send a helicopter, but there are problems with it. Outside, the other tourists want to leave and Richard gets in a fight with one of them, wrestling him to the ground. "If you leave, I'll kill you," Richard snarls.
Richard speaks to an American on the phone who tells him that there are some political problems taking place that are preventing the medical authorities from intervening and helping them. "It's all over the news. Everybody is paying attention and doing everything that they can," the man says. Richard sees the bus leaving and runs after it.
Tokyo. We see a row of photos of Chieko's dead mother, when suddenly the doorbell rings. Chieko gets off the couch and answers it, inviting Detective Mamiya in. He asks for some tea and she gets some, as he looks out the window at the views of the city. Chieko takes out a notepad and writes, "My father had nothing to do with my mother's death."
Mamiya looks at her confused as she writes another note. He asks her, "When your mother jumped off the balcony, your father was asleep?" Chieko nods and takes the detective out to the balcony from which her mother jumped. She writes him another note saying that she saw her mother jump. "What are you talking about?" he asks, but she goes to fetch the tea.
While she does, Mamiya looks at some photos on the wall of Chieko's father on a hunting trip to Morocco. She brings out the tea and he asks her if her father still hunts. When she shakes her head, he tells her, "There was an incident involving a rifle in your father's name. That's why we want to talk to him." She writes another note asking if her father is going to jail, but Mamiya tells her they just need to talk to him.
He tells her he has to go, and Chieko wanders into the next room and removes her clothes. She comes back into the room and walks towards Mamiya, touching his face and guiding his hand to her breast. "This is wrong," he says, and pulls his hand away gruffly, as Chieko begins to sob.
In Morocco, Abdullah tries to wrestle the rifle out of Yussef's hands as the cops shoot Ahmed again, this time killing him. Seeing his brother die, Yussef bangs the gun against a rock to break it and throws it down on the ground. Sobbing, he puts his hands up and walks towards the police. "I killed the American. I was the one who shot at you," he says, as Abdullah holds Ahmed, sobbing.
We see the aftermath of the wedding, then Amelia, Debbie, and Mike, sleeping in the sand in the California desert. A cop car drives down the road nearby as Amelia wakes up. Seeing it, she stands and runs towards it through the sand, screaming for help, but it doesn't see her. "What's happening? Why are we hiding if we didn't do anything wrong?" Mike asks, before telling Amelia that she is bad. "No I'm not, I just did something stupid," she says, hugging him.
Amelia carries Debbie through the desert, as Mike walks alongside them. As they lose sight of the car tracks in the sand, Amelia begins to get panicked. When they reach a shady spot, she lays Debbie down. Debbie seems to be dehydrated, so Amelia props her head up and strokes her forehead. Amelia tells Mike that she has to go look for help and instructs him to stay there and look after Debbie.
Amelia walks through the desert alone, limping and panting, when suddenly she sees a car and runs after it. It's a Latino cop, who offers to help, then goes to the truck and calls to the dispatcher to report that he has found the suspect. As he arrests Amelia, she begs him to find the kids, insisting that she is the children's caretaker and telling him that the children will die. He drives her to the children, but they are nowhere to be found.
Analysis
What had seemed like a benign culture clash gets much more complicated when Santiago tries to drive Amelia and the Jones children across the border. The situation is a complex one, in that the border patrol agents are forceful and disrespectful, while Santiago is drunk and resistant, putting Amelia and the children in a compromising position with government officials. While Santiago is clearly misguided in his insistence that he is okay to drive, the viewer is aligned with him and Amelia, and we can see that the border agent's treatment is brutal and xenophobic. Things get even tenser when Santiago drives away and leaves Amelia and the children in the middle of the desert to wait for his return.
In this section of the film, the conflicts that have already begun to arise reach a boiling point. No sooner do we see Santiago leave Amelia and her charges in the middle of the desert than Richard learns that an ambulance isn't coming and becomes belligerent with everyone who comes into his path. The peace of the previous scenes—the joy of the wedding, the connection between Richard and the Moroccan man after Susan has been operated on—is shattered by the new conflicts that have arisen. Iñárritu structures his movie around the alternating moments of peacefulness and catastrophe that make up a life.
As the story unfolds, we see that the different stories are more closely linked than it seems. The film is not only about the simultaneity of events across the globe, but also about the ways that globalization has direct effects on people around the world. This is represented most starkly in the moment that we learn that it was Chieko's father who, on a hunting trip to Morocco, gave Hassan the gun that eventually made its way into Yussef's hands.
Contrasted with the revelation that Chieko is directly connected to the events in Morocco is the specificity of her personal experience, and her distance from the other events in the film. While the other characters in Babel grapple with the difficulties of culture clashes and political mistranslation, Chieko experiences her own friction with the world, but it has to do with adolescent sexuality, grief, and disability. Like Amelia and Richard and Yussef, she is struggling to integrate the various parts of her life to find happiness, but what separates her from the world around her is far more localized in scope, connected to the loss of her mother, her desire for sexual attention, and her struggles to communicate as a deaf-mute.
In an excruciating sequence of events, Amelia manages to flag down a cop who will help her, before he reports her as the suspected kidnapper of Debbie and Mike. While we know that Amelia is the children's caretaker and we have seen her love and support for them throughout the film, in the eyes of the state, she is a kidnapper, perceived as a villain rather than their nanny. As she tells Mike, she is not a bad person, she just "did something stupid," but for a Mexican woman at the U.S. border who has "done something stupid," her loving care of the Jones children doesn't count for much.
