Nimrod's Children

"Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth." (Genesis 11:9)

Mexican film director Alejandro González Iñarritu is the movie industry's version of Pablo Picasso, chopping up stories and rearranging them without regard to time or space in a collage as cryptic as one of the Spanish artist's creations. While the method is engaging, unless one is blessed with an unusual memory, you need to see Iñarritu's films twice to really understand what you've seen.

Babel is four stories filmed on three continents in four languages which seem to have little or nothing in common at first - Moroccan goatherds in the Atlas mountains, an American couple on vacation, a Hispanic woman and her young charges at a wedding in Tijuana and a rebellious teenaged deaf/mute in Tokyo. What's the connection? Chance; seemingly insignificant details are the butterfly wings that blow a tempest once their consequences are felt on the other side of the globe.

Images of children in the book of Genesis are interwoven into the plot. The rivalry between Cain and Able, Ishmael abandoned to die in the desert, Lot's seductive daughters; the common denominator being the tragedy of characters driven by emotion and their flawed nature to unpredictable, if rational, consequences.

Babel isn't a film friendly to subtitle illiterate Americans, but one I recommend. Not because of the story(ies), rather so that you see for yourself that such a movie can exist. Save for the few human beings on this planet that are fluent in all four languages - English, Spanish, Japanese and Arabic – Babel would have been incredible and unintelligible only a generation or so ago.

Man has broken down the barriers of distance and language that have separated the human race with the power of the mind. Technology. After four or five millennia, Nimrod's children have once again built a city, a global village, and a tower. Iñarritu's Babel is a sample of the mortar between the bricks.

"And they said, Come, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." (Genesis 11:4)