Review: Babel

Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, and a whole lot of American guilt star in this film that ties together four interrelated plots centering on the shooting of an American tourist in Morocco by a peasant child. While her husband bullies anyone who can't speak English in Africa, back in California their children's Mexican nanny takes the kids to Tijuana for her son's wedding and a Japanese salary man raises his handicapped daughter in the wake of his wife's suicide. By the end of the film, many lives are in tatters, while Americans, who have presumably sown the wind, walk away oblivious. Frankly, I'm as tired of film makers with an anti-Western axe to grind as I am of the Dixie Chicks. On a go/no-go scale I give Babel a "no-go".