Babel (2006) on Netflix
A rifle shot in the Moroccan desert strikes Susan Jones on a tour bus. In San Diego nanny Amelia tends her children. In Tokyo deaf teenager Chieko Wataya mourns her mother.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb7.4/10331,069 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes69%
Trailer
Plot summary
Abdullah, a goatherder in the Moroccan desert, buys a rifle from a neighbor to stop the jackals killing his goats, then gives it to his sons Yussef and Ahmed. Testing its range, the boys fire toward the road and a shot strikes a tour bus. Aboard are Richard and Susan Jones, an American couple whose marriage has been strained by the death of their infant son Sam. Richard has the driver stop in Tazzarine while Susan lies wounded. In San Diego, nanny Amelia looks after Debbie and Mike and, hearing of the injury, weighs how to attend her son's wedding near Tijuana. In Tokyo, deaf teenager Chieko Wataya mourns her mother's suicide and seeks attention from boys and older men. Detectives arrive asking about her father, Yasujiro.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Babel (2006)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- An early draft of Guillermo Arriaga's screenplay had no deaf Japanese teenager in it at all: the character was written instead as a Spanish girl who had recently gone blind.
- The American couple's marriage trouble was originally infidelity. The writers replaced it with the death of their baby, a change made so that Brad Pitt could get a firmer grip on the man he was playing.
- Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Guillermo Arriaga fell out after filming over who authored 21 Grams, the writer arguing that cinema is collaborative and the director claiming sole credit. Inarritu then barred Arriaga from the Cannes screening of Babel and was criticized for it.
- Rinko Kikuchi auditioned for Chieko in July 2004 at the age of 23, and Inarritu was struck by her talent but hesitant because she is not deaf. He kept looking through hundreds of actresses for another nine months before giving her the part in April 2005, a week before shooting started.
- Brad Pitt dropped out of a part in The Departed, a picture he was himself producing, so that he could appear in Babel instead.
- The extras playing migrants during the Mexican shoot were not actors at all: the production company hired real immigrants to fill those scenes.
- When Babel reached Japan in 2007, cinemagoers complained of nausea during the strobe-lit nightclub sequence featuring Rinko Kikuchi's character, and the distributors responded by issuing a health warning describing the scene.
