Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in a moment of crisis in 'Babel'. - Contributed

NEW YORK (AP):

Babel begins with one character walking through the Moroccan desert to sell his rifle and ends with another character finding her footing on the balcony of a Tokyo high rise.

In between, it meanders for a long time across continents and in various languages, through scenarios that can be both profound and profoundly self-important.

It's a good film that might have seemed great if movies like Traffic and Syriana didn't already exist and hadn't set such an exceptionally high standard for intertwined stories about international angst and anguish.

But Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu also appears to be pilfering from himself: same writer (Guillermo Arriaga) and cinematographer (Rodrigo Prieto) as in his first two films, Amores Perros and 21 Gram's, same interlocking structure, same resonant sensation of grief.

It all just plays out on a larger scale.

The faces on the poster are ones you've seen before, countless times: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Amores Perros star Gael Garcia Bernal. But also featured up there with them is Rinko Kikuchi, who provides some of the most moving moments as Chieko, a deaf Tokyo teen trying to figure out who she is after her mother's death.

This period in her life would have been complicated enough under optimal circumstances, but Chieko has the added burdens of feeling inordinately isolated because of her parents' absences and because of her disability.

Story compelling

Her story - the simplest of them all - is also the most compelling and could have provided the basis for an emotionally gripping movie of its own.

There is, of course, the plot line featuring Pitt and Blanchett as husband and wife Susan and Bill, travelling though Morocco on a vacation that was already strained long before Susan gets shot in the shoulder while riding in a tour bus. The bullet comes from a mountaintop far away, where two young brothers are playing around with the rifle their father recently bought to protect their farm. The rifle itself came from a peasant, the one whose footsteps crunching in the sand mark the film's opening.

Because Susan has been shot, in a scene that's both subtle and chaotic, she and Bill can't return home to San Diego as expected. And because they can't get home their nanny, Amelia (Adriana Barraza in a heart-tugging portrayal) must stay longer with their children (Elle Fanning and Nathan Gamble). That means she might miss her son's wedding back in Mexico, until she reluctantly agrees to bring the kids with her, a decision that trembles with underlying peril from the very beginning.

There's so much back-and-forth going on here that you sometimes forget Pitt and Blanchett are in the film; when Inarritu returns to their story, the thought "oh yeah, them" comes to mind. But their plot line is one of several in which the director is trying to say something - he may not even know what - about the universal recognition we all share, and the simultaneous disconnectedness.