palabras JENNY HALPER

If you imagined Syriana without the thorny politics, you might come up with Babel, a subtle and kaleidoscopic drama with a sprawling cast of characters connected by one gun and a few initially innocent transitions.

The movie opens with a nine-year-old boy using a tourist bus as target practice. The bullet’s recipient is a grieving American mother (Cate Blanchett) who is traveling with her stoic hunk-of-a-husband (Brad Pitt) to sort out a marriage on the rocks. They end up fighting for her life in a hut hours from Morocco, waiting for the American Embassy to send medical help, while the American Embassy is more interested in accusing terrorists and splattering the story all over the news.

One of the most remarkable things about Babel is that it's never confusing, despite the page-long list of principal characters and time zones. As the script, which was co-written by Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, jumps from past to present and from Tokyo to California to Morocco, the movie holds the audience in thrall with sheer emotional power, releasing tension and building it at all the right times.

The most haunting plot line involves a deaf-mute Japanese girl (Rinko Kikuchi) who searches the Tokyo nightlife for love – or at least sex –nursing an infatuation for a police officer trailing her businessman father. She's connected in a way I won't reveal, not because this is a thriller or a mystery - like most excellent movies, it's hard to genre-fy - but because there is some satisfaction in putting the puzzle pieces together.

Those pieces include the American couple's children (Nathan Gamble and Elle Fanning), their Mexican nanny (a standout Adriana Barraza), who takes them on a day trip across the border to her son's wedding, and her nephew (Gael Garcia Bernal), a charmer who reeks so strongly of trouble I could smell it in the screening room.

To say that Babel is difficult to watch would be an understatement; to call it emotionally wrenching would be accurate but also a disservice, because what Inarritu and Arriaga have done is crafted one of the most incisive portraits of cross-culture communication (or lack there of) that I've ever seen on screen. They find humor in unlikely places, and, amid chaos, grant their characters surprising moments of grace.

Babel just might be the best film of the year.

Grade: A+