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We can work it out

Brad Pitt as Richard Jones in Babel
  • Posted at 1:38pm
  • 25 April 2008
  • by AndrewCollins-RT
  • 1 comment

French director Jean-Luc Godard famously said, "A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end . . . but not necessarily in that order." It's a theory that Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu has taken to heart with the non-linear plotting of Amores Perros, 21 Grams and now Babel (starring Brad Pitt, left).

This multi-stranded drama skips between three continents and four stories, involving Brad Pitt, a Japanese teenager, a Mexican nanny, and two Moroccan goatherds. Of course, these “fractured” narratives are familiar from art-house movies, but Babel is a major studio picture.

In the 1990s, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction showed that there was an appetite among younger audiences for unconventional story arcs. Since then, the time-reversing Memento and the parallel-plotting of films like Traffic have proved popular with both punters and critics. In other words, we’re cleverer than Hollywood thinks.

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  • Posted on 20 May 2008
  • at 8:02am
  • by MorrisMitchener

A good point that an unconventional story structure can work for mainstream audiences. It's just a shame that Babel is used as an example. The main problem with the film was the fact that it though it was far more intelligent than it actually was. I thought it was ponderous and pretentious and I am by no means the only one. Pulp fiction is a very good example though.

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