BABEL

Genesis 11:7-9
7. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8. So the Lord scattered them abroad from then upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth and from then did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Such is the genesis of the name for director Alejandro González Iñárritu's latest film, "Babel." It could have been called "The Rifle," as the gun plays as significant a part as does the inability to communicate with one's fellow wo/man. The story is based on an idea of writer Guillermo Armago's, who wrote the screenplay. He set the action in four countries in which the characters are linked either personally or connected through the rifle.

In this shrinking world of instant electronic communication and travel by jets like air-borne hotels and on cruise ships, one can visit just about any country in the world, except maybe the extreme north or south. Most people choose to travel to exotic places and once there, want to ride a tour bus from their luxury hotel to colorful villages so they can mingle with the natives, try native foods, roam through shops and stalls, and buy stuff. This is where we find a contentious married couple, Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett), from Los Angeles. They are tooling along on a tour bus on the winding roads through the barren hills of Morocco's Berber country.

The camera pans a broad, all-encompassing landscape, then focuses on a scene of sheepherders and their families, going about their daily business around their stone homes, tucked into the rocky mountainside (Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieta). A father trusts his oldest son, about 16, with a new rifle to shoot jackals who try to steal their sheep. He exchanged a sheep and some money for it with a trader/hunting guide. Iñárritu spends a lot of time with the villagers, which is good, otherwise we wouldn't care so much not only about what happens to these villagers, but also about his characters' stories in the other countries represented in the film. He establishes the kids' relationship with their father, sibling rivalry (the youngest son is the best shot), and burgeoning sexuality. In one scene, the boy spies on a girl, whose mind is not all there, as she dresses.

Richard and Susan have left their two, perfect, blond kids, a boy about two or three and his six or seven year old sister, Debbie (Dakota Fanning's little sister, Elle, just as remarkable an actress as Dakota), back home in Los Angeles in the care of their nanny, Amelia (Adriana Barraza). She has plans to drive to Mexico with her nephew, Santiago (Gael Garcia Bernal), for her son's wedding once Susan and Richrd return from their trip. But you know what they say about plans.

The Berber kids are in the mountains with the sheep and the gun. They're bored. The trader had bragged that the gun can shoot things many unbelievable kilometers away. The oldest tries it out, missing shots like crazy. Dismayed, the youngest picks it up. The tour bus tools along. A shot is fired, glass breaks, Susan is shot. The outcome of this unfortunate accident is played out for the rest of the film, even as the film interrupts their situation to pick up on the progress of other ongoing scenerios, which is jarring at first. "Babel" begins with Richard's phone call to Amelia from a Moroccan hospital, after she's put the kids to bed. As she listens on the wall phone in the couple's home,we hear his trembly voice over the wire, telling her about the accident and that they've had to delay their return. (At the end of the film, it loops disconcertingly back to this scene, only from Richard's persepective at a payphone in the hospital corridor.) Amelia's wedding trip agenda is screwed.

In a long flashback to the village where the bus has taken them, Richard shows his anger and frustration at trying to get help for his bleeding wife. Shouting and waving his arms about, he can't understand them and they can't understand him. Finally, he finds a man who speaks English, having spent time in the US. He tells Richard that there are no phones, no electricity, no doctor. And to make matters worse, Richard's fellow European travelers in their gauchos, shorts and hung about with cameras are pissed at him because they are delayed. No one seems to care a bean whether Susan lives or dies except for Richard and the villagers, who give whatever help they can. The film then cuts to Amelia's plight. She opts to take the kids with her to Mexico with free-wheeling Santiago (you sense the danger, it only gets worse). Meanwhile, in this post 9/11 era and world-wide fear of shadowy, undisciplined terrorists, the shot had to have come from one of them. The media picks up the story. Authorities investigate.

In the middle of all this, we segue to Tokyo, where we meet a wealthy Japanese businessman who is a widower, Yasujiro (Koji Yikusho), and his beautiful, deaf, teenage daugther, Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi). Chieko is desperate to explore sex with a boy her own age (she does her own version of Sharon Stone's career-making move), her dentist, and a police investigator looking into her mother's death. Iñárritu depicts the hyper-frenetic Tokyo teenage life as the camera follows Chieko and her similarly sense-limited friends (they go to a school for the deaf, read lips and use sign language; speech comes out as moans or soft grunts) to flashy, hi-tech, downtown malls and restaurants where teens hang out. In Chieko and her father's sky-high downtown condominium, we see a photo of Yasujiro on a hunting expedition in Morocco accompanied by who else but the hunting guide/trader. Yasujiro is holding the very rifle the boy had used to shoot the bus. Ah ha!

Returning from the wedding at dawn, Santiago is stopped at the border. Oscar nominee for his role as the killer, Perry, in the film "Capote," Clifton Collins, Jr., plays a dedicated border guard. With two little blond kids asleep in the back seat and a bewildered Amelia next to him, Santiago doesn't give the guard straight answers. Still drunk, he pulls a stupid stunt, dumps nanny and kids off in the desert and speeds away. At this point, you wonder how the hell this film can have a good ending. Susan, dying in a stone house after being sewn up sans anesthetic by a doctor from a neighboring village, is tended by an ancient healer,who gives her a hit off her opium pipe, knocking her out, then waves a smoking bunch of weeds over her. There is a tender scene between the couple when Richard helps his wife perform an everyday body function. Meanwhile, a bedraggled, sweaty Amelia staggers through the desert in high heels, with feverish kids. Another scene follows of Moroccan police looking for the perp and his rifle, harrassing and beating up villagers; the scene of the shepherd boys and their father, holed up in the hills from the police, has a tragic yet satisfying ending, and Yasujiro arrives home to find his daughter standing on the balcony, stark-naked.

"Babel" is an important film because of its theme of communication, or lack thereof, which can lead to drastic circumstances, whether the attempt to understand one another is cross-cultural, among foreigners, or even among those who speak the same language (Yasujiro and Cheiko, especially). An unsettling message comes through, though: If you are an American with money and connections, the government will spare nothing to help you and ensure your safety. The emphasis unfortunately being on money and connections.

The film was at no. 6 of the top twenty last week, according to "Entertainment Weekly" after gaining a 505 percent increase in box-office take. This week, it has slipped to no. 8, but is still holding strong in its four weeks in theatres. The acting, from major stars to bit players, is first-rate throughout. Pitt has matured; the cameras picks up his incipient crows feet, worry lines, and greying hair, though Blanchett has little to do but lie there moaning and looking heavenly.