Babel: A-

To me there is something extraordinarily entertaining, even tranfixing, about the way that Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu manuevers between the oft-tricky pillars of race, money, religion, sex, politics, etc. With his latest globe spanning epic - this also wraps up a trilogy that included Amorres Perros and 21 Grams - he examines the seemingly endless gaps that can seperate people and the seemingly endless lengths a person would go to cross that boundary, that wall of miscommunication and dislocation.

The director was lucky: he was gifted with one of the most diverse casts ever and actors who are willing to go to places, to hint at things rarely seen (I dare you not to be equally repulsed and saddened by Chieko's permiscuity). And though I couldn't possibly explain every twist and turn in this movie I will lay out the characters, as a sort of road map to the tragic world envisioned in the complex script by writer Guillermo Arriaga:

-Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett) are two wealthy American tourists touristing in Morocco.

-Amelia (Adriana Barraza, radiating all sorts of good feelings) plays nanny to Richard and Susan's two children: Mike (Nathan Gamble) and Debbie (Elle Fanning).

-Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi, quietly stealing every scene she's in) is a deaf-mute Japanese girl stewing away in a pool of regret, lonliness, grief, and arousal after her mother's suicide.
Now pause for a moment...

You can almost here they bang! as their lives collide. What starts out as one solitary gun shot blossoms into a world-wide "terrorist incident" and somehow the audience is swept away into a film that is as beautiful as it is powerful. There are missteps and assumptions, lies and tears, a wedding and a rave. and there is noise. Lots of mindless, desolate noise. The sounds of a world that is either to depraved or to stupid to care about anything but itself. Inarritu invites us to cut through all the babel though and be understood.

Of course, as the movie says, to be understood first you must listen.