Babel, the much buzzed about new film by Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga, is a very somber triptych about grief and lack of communication. It borrows its title from the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. You may remember that in that story God becomes angry at humanity for trying to build a tower too close to his heavenly domain, so he makes them speak different languages and scatters them throughout the wide world. (The lesson of course is that Old Testament God is a bit of a dick.) This film is about some of those scattered, divided humans.

The first segment of the film is devoted to a dour couple of Americans, Susan and Richard (Blanchett and Pitt), who are trying to salvage their relationship on vacation in Morocco. You know it’s a serious movie, because Brad Pitt is showing his age. As they travel through the country on a tourist bus, Susan is hit by a bullet, forcing the bus to pull over into remote village. Meanwhile we learn that they weren’t shot by terrorists as everyone suspects, but by a couple of boys who were simply playing around with a gun, and didn’t mean to shoot anyone. Naturally the mortality of the situation brings the unhappy couple together as only a crisis can, while the other tourist are rattled by being so close to the people who actually live in the land they’ve come to see. Iñárritu clearly loves the desolate landscape of the desert, perhaps more than he loves the stories that play out against the rock and sand. It’s an interesting premise, but it’s underdeveloped, the boys’ fate seems preordained tragedy, while the couple’s is just wholly uninteresting because their characters are never really established.

Coincidence ties this story with the other two. In Los Angeles, a nanny is persuaded to take the American children left in her charge with her to Mexico for a wedding. This story features international leading man Gael García Bernal, who rose to fame with Iñárritu after the remarkable Amores Perros, and his lively performance is a welcome respite from the sense of gloom that permeates the film. Iñárritu gives us the wedding in a vibrant montage, but the resolution of the story is confusing and trite. And while it raises moral issues about the border, it also undermines its own point with its festive depiction of Mexico. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would leave such a wonderful place.

The chance link binding the third tale of Babel seems especially weak. Set in Japan, it features a deaf girl (Yakusho) grieving the loss of her mother and yearning for sexual relief. There’s something moralistic about the idea that a young woman acting out sexually must be doing so because she’s been traumatized. Anyways, the story itself seems to be centered around a few visual set pieces, and like the other stories, suffers from dramatic inertia. There is a naïve idea among some dramatists that grief is the most genuine emotion, and Babel simply wallows in grief. There is very little insight or tension in any of the stories, and that lack of momentum forces the filmmakers to engage in some dubious misdirection to keep the audience’s attention. In his similarly structured film Amores Perros, Iñárritu imbues each story with a rich mysterious texture, but in Babel, his exquisite visual sense is paired with clunky dead-end stories that can’t be redeemed by the occasional striking image.

—Edward Rholes