I reserve a special place in my heart for ambitious filmmakers who tackle important, "big" themes. Alejandro Gonzalez-Inarritu fits that description. He always takes a panoramic view of human nature, and Babel, his third feature, is drenched in contemporary relevance. He returns to his multi-strand, cross-cutting narrative style to illustrate the consequences of miscommunication and carelessness in a globalized 21st century. While doing so, Babel ponders issues such as immigration, Westerner entitlement, terrorism and urban alienation.

Babel is consistently gripping and engrossing. I am not surprised that it received three awards at the Cannes film festival: Best Director, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and Grand Technical award (for editing). The film is simply a technical marvel. Two sequences in particular astound: one inside a Tokyo disco, and a wedding in a small village in northern Mexico. Gonzalez-Inarritu deserves admiration for, among many other things, his direction of actors. It's no surprise that the seasoned pros are fine; it's that the performances of lesser actors and non-actors are equally accomplished. Two Moroccan boys and a Mexican nanny (Adriana Barraza) steal every scene in which they appear. As a matter of fact, Ms. Barraza (Amores Perros) is being mentioned as a possible nominee at the Oscars and Golden Globes.

Babel is a thesis film on a large canvas in which, lamentably, some characters get short-shrifted.

"I might buy Babel if it had any real interest in its characters"
(David Ansen, Newsweek)

"The filmmakers don't seem to understand or care much about many of these people"
(Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader).

Ansen and Rosenbaum are perhaps guilty of exaggeration but their argument is valid. The most glaring example involves Chieko. We meet the deaf-mute Tokyo teen during a volleyball game. She gets suspended from the game due to a temper tantrum. After the game, a teammate suggests she needs to get laid. She flashes guys at clubs, disrobs in front of strangers, and attempts to kiss her dentist. Their rejection only increases her frustration. Later we learn that months earlier she found her mother shot in their apartment's balcony. When a cop tells her he needs to talk to her dad, she wonders whether he was implicated in her mother's death. Chieko is saddled with too much suffering and too many complications for a character in one out of four subplots. Gonzalez-Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga cannot possibly begin to do justice to such a character. Chieko deserves her own movie. Other weaknesses in the script, namely credibility lapses, are easier to overlook.

Despite its flaws, Babel is an important, technically brilliant, and engrossing movie that deserves to be seen.