In case you didn't get the message from last year's "Crash," this year's "Babel" is here to remind you that we are all
connected in this crazy world of ours, that violence ruins lives, and that we should stop being so mistrusting of foreigners. How you could possibly miss that point in a movie as obvious as "Crash," I don't know, but you definitely won't miss it after a movie as obvious as "Babel." Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu and his writing partner, Guillermo Arriaga, made a fine team in the striking "Amores Perros." They followed it up with "21 Grams," which used the same non-linear storytelling and intersecting plots as "Perros" but with much less impact. Now, in "Babel," they're at it again, only with an unwelcome sense of self-importance and heavy-handedness. Each subsequent effort seems to dilute the formula a little more. There are four stories of varying degrees of connectedness. In order of appearance, they concern: two young Moroccan boys, Ahmed (Said Tarchani) and Yussef (Boubker Ait El Caid), whose father gives them a rifle to help keep jackals away from the goat herd; Amelia (Adriana Barraza), a matronly Mexican housekeeper in San Diego who loves her employers' two young children as though they were her own; Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett), American tourists in Morocco who are waylaid by a serious accident; and Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), a Tokyo high school student who is deaf and mute and painfully eager to explore her sexuality.
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