"Babel" review (old)-- pulled out of the vault

Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is a glutton for tragedy, and his Golden Globe winner for best picture, Babel, is proof of it. The film follows four bizarrely connected storylines wrought with irony, panic, pain, love, loneliness and sheer and utter embarrassment.
It starts off with two Moroccan boys, Yussef (Boubker Ait El Caid) and Ahmed (Said Tarchani), who, bored out of their skulls with rifle in hand, decide to test the gun's firepower by shooting at faraway targets. Bad idea. When the bullet penetrates the neck of an American woman (Cate Blanchett) international fear of ties to terrorism strikes.
With no hospital in the immediate area, the woman, Susan, and her husband, Richard (Brad Pitt), are obliged to stay in a primitive nearby village while the American Embassy takes their sweet time in lending a hand.
Meanwhile, back in America, Amelia (Adriana Barraza), Susan and Richard's illegal immigrant nanny, makes the ill-fated decision to take their kids Debbie (Elle Fanning, a.k.a. Dakota's little sister) and Mike (Nathan Gamble) across the Mexican border for her son's wedding.
And in probably the most loosely linked, but compelling storyline out of them all, a deaf-mute teenage Japanese girl, Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) turns to exhibitionism as a means of finding someone, anyone, who will nurture and love her- or at least, have sex with her. Oh yeah, her father is the guy who initially sold the rifle to his hunting tour guide in Morocco, who sold it to the boys' father for a stipend of $500 and a goat.
Don't get me wrong- Babel was, by all means, purely entertaining. Boubker Ait El Caid, who was apparently cast after Inarritu saw him playing soccer in a nearby city square, probably gives the most brilliant performance as he's fessing up to shooting at the bus. As for Brad Pitt's performance, I think the old ladies gabbing in the bathroom after the movie (who obviously paid $7 just for the eye candy) said it all: "Brad Pitt was barely in the movie!" "Yeah, I thought I saw him shooting guns in the previews." Speaking of eye candy, the Tokyo skyline shots were absolutely stunning.
The main problem I had with this movie is that, though Inarritu's intentions were to illustrate that "it's a small world after all," there was no actual plot to give these characters and storylines a true purpose; there was no sustenance. Nothing solid or concrete actually happens, it's merely a string of loosely connected, meaningless events that are so incredibly farfetched they would never happen in a million years.
Though you do manage to feel scared and ashamed for the characters, it is brought out by tragedy after tragedy- perhaps the only tool Inarritu (whose previous productions, 21 grams and Amores Perros, seemed to do the same) has in his shed. And I'm not sure what the anti-racist and cross-culture undertones were trying to accomplish other than the fact that they seemed to be ripped straight out of Paul Haggis's Crash.
This is not to say that Babel isn't worth seeing. It's definitely interesting and captivating- but let's face it, Brad Pitt is barely in it, and whether or not it deserves "best picture" is debatable.