Babel, a conversation between loss and love, and damned bad luck.

The massive lenses of a movie crew follow one massive fissure through three continents and four families, and the assembled shards are on display for the viewer to make sense of. It requires patience, but the emotional content of the movie is strong enough to act in the viewers' individual memories of primal desires for protection, for love, and resistance to death and abandonment. Patience for these topics is per force. These themes, big as they are, are not the sole content of the film. In addition, the global misunderstanding and hysteria over a local tragedy, the loneliness and isolation of non-fluent Americans at large, and, neither last nor least, the horrible consequences of mixing children and guns. It's a big movie, and I'm stunned it held together, even though the editing seemed to come from some automatic writing exercise, as if the clips of film were thrown up into the air, and re-spliced together as they fell. It worked.

Turning from ideas of artistic magic back to the pins and cogs to try to explain how it was done so well, one can say that the acting helped a hell of a lot, and that director pulled off something impressive. I've never seen small boys act as well, and no one was holding the story back. The lead females fought beautifully and eloquently through roles of enforced powerlessness and silence, and the male roles delved into forced encounters with fear and flight. To tell the truth, the acting was just more magic to me. I've no idea why that acting was so good, although I'm sure the script and direction had something to do with it.

The secret of this film seems to keep coming back to a well written script, many compelling stories, many characters we know and love. Note, there are absolutely no bad guys in this film, although arguably some heroes. The inciting incidents were almost insignificant when taken out of context, but I had no doubt that the enormous events that kept me riveted and breathless with awe were the natural consequences of these incidents.

The actual filming, and the sound, didn't hurt the cause, either. Particularly impressive to me in both regards were the scenes in Japan. The sound, altered sound, and lack of sound in the night club conveyed a real sense of a completely other and isolated world, while the filming, as with the steady rise and fall of the sky-scrapers behind the ecstatic young woman, nearly still herself though on a swing, highlighted the importance of the visual world, and the sense of life as totally and unequivocally subjective.

As this is a suspenseful film (although suspense doesn't cover the deep primordial stew that heaved itself to the surface as I watched through the flickering cinematic eye) I would be crossing the line to discuss the last moments in any detail. All I will say is that the endings themselves are the final storyline all unto themselves, and can be seen as a commentary on what are allowable endings in different storytelling cultures around the world, particularly in the US.

Oh, and thank you, Mr. Pitt, for letting yourself be filmed looking so ragged.