'Babel' Weaves a Story Out of Noise, Desperation

By Bob Mondello

Published October 26, 2006 at 1:00 PM PDT

The latest film from Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros and 21 Grams) follows multiple story lines that span three continents.

The threads include a young deaf Japanese girl struggling to recover from her mother's death; the shooting of an American tourist in Morocco; and the relationship between a Mexican woman and the two American children she cares for.

The film reveals the connections between its characters -- and, as the title suggests, the difficulties they have in communicating.

Bob Mondello

Bob Mondello, who jokes that he was a jinx at the beginning of his critical career — hired to write for every small paper that ever folded in Washington, just as it was about to collapse — saw that jinx broken in 1984 when he came to NPR.

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