Babel.

BABEL Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Paramount Vantage, 2006)

In Genesis 11 God creates a cacophony of tongues that divides and scatters humanity into a jumble of alienated tribes. Given its title, you might expect this riveting and interlocking tale of four families from Morocco, Mexico, Japan, and the United States to focus on the impenetrable borders created by this linguistic babble. Still, the most heartrending failures of communication are between family members who speak the same tongue but cannot find anything meaningful or redemptive to say to one another.

In this fractured puzzle of a tale we are simultaneously tied to people in faraway places with strange sounding names and cut off from the loved ones who sleep and eat next to us. Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett) are an American couple who flee into the Moroccan desert to escape their private war over a dead child. Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) is a deaf Japanese high school student trying desperately to distance herself from the stoic and helpless father with whom she shares the terrible memory of her mother's suicide. And each of these couples are somehow connected to two other families soon to be shattered by the threat or reality of senseless and tragic death.

Indeed, along with a common inability to bridge the stony silences that drive loved ones apart, each of these families share a tragic vulnerability to a sort of random and chaotic violence from which neither wealth nor distance can protect them. And this is precisely the shared humanity of these tales, the reality that bridges all the linguistic and cultural divides--that all of us are frail, and that each of us, regardless of our differing tongues or cultures, is tied together by the love and grief that makes us human and that drives us into each other's arms.

Babel is not a tale that promises happy endings if we reach out to one another, but a tragic epic that shows us we have no other option.