Babel

In keeping with its title, has a jumble of languages and settings (Moroccan desert, southern California/Mexico, Tokyo), and some of its drama arises out of communication breakdowns. But its main thrust is a matter of several far-flung stories that are both separate and intertwined—and about their cumulative, convoluted consequences, for each other and for us in the audience. Each of the stories mixes a sensationalistic incident into a tale of unintended consequences. The fragmented, multi-phased manner of presenting the stories encourages us to step back from the tabloid sensationalism of the individual anecdotes and view the narrative action from a more open-ended and various set of contexts. Writer/director Alejandro González Iñárritu and scenarist Guillermo Arriaga may have gotten more deeply satisfying results from these methods in their previous collaborations (21 Grams and, especially, Amores Perros). But Babel has plenty of payoffs, both as sidelong storytelling and as a canny rechanneling of the soap operas and police stories that are ubiquitous in the U.S., Mexico, Japan and maybe Morocco, too.