In a desolate Moroccan desert, a humble goat herder purchases a high-powered rifle from a fellow farmer. He hands it to his two sons, Yussef and Ahmed (Boubker Ait Caid, Said Tarchini), with instructions to shoot any jackals that threaten the family's herd of goats. The two boys, curious as to just how powerful the rifle's range must be start taking potshots at nearby rocks, then at cars passing by on the nearby dirt road. At first, they think the bullets simply aren't reaching their targets, but then, to their horror, they see a tour bus start to slow down, then stop...

...inside that bus, a pair of American tourists, Richard and Susan Jones (Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett) are busy attempting to salvage their fraying marriage. They recently lost their infant son in a case of crib death, and are now searching the Moroccan landscape for "love". However, their tenuous reconciliation is shattered like the safety glass of the bus's window, as Susan suddenly takes a high-powered round on ammunition in the shoulder. With her bleeding profusely and going into shock, Richard is forced to ask the driver to take them to a nearby village to await an ambulance that will transport Susan to a hospital several hours away...

Meanwhile, in Tokyo(!), a deaf-mute teenage girl named Cheiko Wataya (the remarkable Rinko Kikuchi) is going through a crisis of crippling loneliness. Her father, Yasujiro (Koji Yakusho), is unable to break though her daughter's shell, brought upon by her mother's death years before and the handicap that isolates her from all but her fellow deaf-mute classmates. In frustration, she begins to experiment with her budding sexuality, brazenly flashing her private parts at a group of cute boys at a local teen hangout, making lurid advances on her nonplussed dentist, generally doing anything to break through the cruel biological joke that numbs her reactions to the bustling world around her. What does this have to do with the desperate situation that's going down in Morocco? It gradually comes into focus. But wait, there's more...!

In the California home of Richard and Susan, their two children (Nathan Gamble and Elle Fanning of the ubiquitous Fanning child dynasty) are being watched by their Mexican nanny, Amelia (Adriana Barraza). Due to the dire situation their parents find themselves embroiled in halfway around the world, Amelia is asked to keep an eye on the kids longer than she was expected to. But Amelia desperately does not want to miss the wedding of her young son. So, she and her nephew Santiago (Gael Garcia Bernal) bundle the two up and take them on a trip over the border into Mexico. Everything goes swimmingly... until that night, when they try to cross back into the U.S. A suspicious customs officer starts harassing Santiago and Amelia as to the lack of a written permission slip from the children's' parents. In a fit of drunken, unthinking panic, Santiago floors it through the border crossing, dropping Amelia and the terrified kids off in the middle of the desert with a nebulous promise to return for them once he's shaken off the police hot on his tail...

The third and final movie in an unofficial "trilogy" of films by screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu (following 2000's Amores Perros and 2003's 21 Grams), this tryptich of narritively-dense, temporally-fractured, emotionally-charged dramas reaches it's most ambitious peak with Babel, a film with achingly lofty aspirations that, despite a number of strong performances and some gut-wrenching sequences, is less than the sum of it's impressive parts.

It's become something of an awards-season standby to have at least one film constructed out of a series of seemingly unrelated narrative threads that gradually form into a patchwork quilt, usually with some overriding blanket theme woven throughout the various plot threads. These films run the gamut from Robert Altman's Short Cuts to Paul Thomas Anderson's transcendent Magnolia to, most controversial of all, Paul Haggis' ham-fisted Best Picture-winner Crash. All of these films usually have a general "hook" to them (sins of the father in Magnolia, racism in Crash), and Babel is no exception, with it's pretentious, Biblically-inspired title giving weight to a series of stories about how lack of communication between cultures leads to the endangerment of the innocent. Weither it's those two Moroccan children who let their fascination with a gun lead to their being pursued by the local police, or how Richard and Susan, ensconced in a dingy domicile in a flyspeck Moroccan village, find their attempts to procure rescue frustrated left and right by miscommunication with their embassy and the local populace, or how deaf-mute Japanese teen Cheviot finds herself literally cut off from communication from the world around her, fueling an emotional breakdown, or how Santiago's bull-headed clash of wills with the border cops leads to the desperate plight of Amelia and her young wards in the blistering desert heat.

The problem is, unlike 21 Grams, where the stories of the three leads (Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro) eventually came together in a plausible way, Babel struggles to make it's Japanese and Mexican threads intersect with the twin Moroccan drama in any meaningful way other than to fill screentime. At least with the Japanese segments, the excellent, emotionally-wrenching performance of Kikuchi carries the thread on it's own two feet. In fact, I would have gladly watched a movie that consisted only of this story. The Mexican segment goes out of it's way to contrive it's desperate climax (why were Amelia and Santiago allowed to take the kids into Mexico in the first place if they didn't have the written consent of their parents?), and thus feels like a third (er, fourth?) wheel, only marking time between the more intriguing Japanese and Moroccan storylines. Barazza's performance is fine, but I could have done without this whole storyline altogether.

As for the dual Moroccan threads, Pitt and Blanchett both do fine work, even if the former's designer stubble, eye bags, and graying hair are right out of the George Clooney Syriana playbook and the latter has little to do other that writhe in pain. The story of the two children comes to an emotionally wrenching conclusion, although it's a bit tough to swallow some of the thoughtless decisions made by the characters (those cops are awfully trigger-happy...).

Taken as a whole, Babel is a technically-assured, ambitious piece of work that has to be admired for it's noble intentions, but it's also patchy, and it's relentlessly dour tone drags it down over the course of it's lengthy 2 1/2 hour running time. For fans of the director, it's worth seeing, but Inarritu's "gimmick" has begun to wear out it's welcome. Maybe he should hang up his "we are the world" pretensions for the time being and follow fellow art house auteurs like Christopher Nolan and Paul Greengrass into the uncharted territory of Hollywood franchise filmmaking. I'd pay good money to see Inarritu's jumpy, kinetic visual style translated to a rockin' action movie.


Presentation
The film's 2:35.1 aspect ratio is presented in a gorgeous anamorphic transfer that beautifully reproduces the crisp photography of ace DP Rodrigo Prieto. From the desolate, beige earth tones on the Moroccan desert to the neon-fused hustle and bustle of the streets of Tokyo to the dusty romance of Mexico, the film is a visual feast, as is this DVD transfer. The 5.1 English track (with additional options in English 2.0 and French 5.1) runs the gamut from the whisper of distant wind keening across the Moroccan desert to the anguished howls of Cate Blanchett as she writhes and bleeds on the floor of a humble domicile (this leads to perhaps the single best sound design moment of 2006 cinema, cutting directly from Blanchett's agonized screams as her bullet wound gets sewn up to the shocking dead silence of Rinko Kikuchi's POV as she sits in a dentist's office waiting room, a barely-perceptable bass hum depicting what little sensory input she takes from the world around her). The sound design weaves itself around the meandering guitar improvisations of composer Gustavo Santolala, who inexplicably copped the film's only Oscar win for his sparse, tuneless drone of a score (much of which wasn't even specifically written for the film, which should have ruled it ineligible for consideration in the first place).

Extras
Previously issued in January as a bare-bones disc geared towards nothing more than generating rentals to drum up Oscar support (see another Paramount title, Clint Eastwood's Flags Of Our Fathers, which pulled the same shameful instant double-dip trick), this new 2-disc release of Babel has as it's signature (i.e., only) extra the 1:27:40 making-of feature Common Ground: Under Construction Notes, a fly-on-the-wall look at Inarritu's cast and crew spreading themselves across three continents as they pieced their intersecting narratives together. In Morocco, we see Inarritu casting many supporting faces who had never seen a movie before, let alone had any acting experience, as well as adapting to the harsh desert climate. In Tokyo, we see the crew trying to film a driving scene and nearly getting arrested by the police for slowing down traffic for more than a minute(!), as well as interviews with a pair of Yakuza gangsters who acted as the crew's personal bodyguards, allowing them access to certain filming locations. In Mexico, we see Ardiana Barazza pushing herself to the limit carrying Elle Fanning through sweltering, 120+ degree desert temperatures intercut with the genial extras used in the wedding sequences. There are no artfully-composed shots of actors sitting in front of the film's soft-focus poster delivering easily digestible sound bites destined for Entertainment Tonight, no incessant backslapping, just an honest look at the intense hardships that went into the film's production. This is one of the best making-of's in recent memory. There's also the film's beautifully-edited trailer (2:33), replete with 5.1 sound, and a previews menu offering trailers and sneak peaks for other Paramount titles like An Inconvenient Truth, Black Snake Moan, Things We Lost In The Fire, Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer and Flags Of Our Fathers.

The Bottom Line
Ambitious, beautifully-crafted and well-performed by all, the contrivances and forced ironies of Babel ultimately sap it of it's grand intentions (despite a haunting final image). Well-worth a look for fans of the director, but adjust your expectations accordingly.