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The film spirals away from these two characters, supposedly the central ones, and settles upon two boys becoming men, a deaf-mute girl coping with her budding sexuality, and a fifty-something Mexican nanny attending her son's wedding. Slowly, one starts to make the connections between the four plotlines, until the endpoint, where an unusual twist sends you out of the theater scratching your head.

The thing I was most scratching my head about was how a film that stars two of the industry's most reliable actors (Pitt and Blanchett) could create such a dull plotline for the leads. Blanchett, despite having the gusto of no other actor in her generation, is reduced to paltry bitchery. The film never explores more than the surface-level of her neglected-wife soccer mom character. Pitt, in turn, is simply a very good-looking guy who is apparently a schmuck of a father. As these two characters are the catalyst for all other events in the story, one would assume that their storyline would go somewhere. Instead, it lies dead from the first bullet shot. I spent every moment of their screen time hoping that it would transition over to one of the other more entertaining plotlines.

This urge is essentially the problem of films like Babelčthey simply can't find a balance. The most interesting plotline, that of the nanny, was so much better than the rest of the film that the movie felt lifeless and pointless when not focusing on her struggle to fight her way to and from America.

By making one point of the film so much more interesting than the others, the film becomes tedious. No matter how compelling some individual parts are, the viewer leaves the theater wishing that they had gone for a more coherent, well-distributed film.

The two most famous examples of this style, Traffic and Crash, go about this style in different ways than Babel, albeit with polar results. Traffic, a film that coalesces four plotlines into one drug-addled frenzy, is a crackling flick. Actors take their respective stories and run with them, making each character's seconds on screen seem exciting and worth waiting for.

The audience yearns for each character, yet is so satisfied with whatever is onscreen that their anticipation for the different tales becomes simply a strong adoration for the movie, and the people leave after the credits full of conversation for the ride home.

Crash, last year's Best Picture Oscar winner, also manages to find a balance between all of its characters as they pursue equality on one fateful Los Angeles day. However, Crash represents everything that Babel did wrong and squares it. This film kept its characters so subdued and two-dimensional that the plotlines were dull and indistinguishable from each other. Whereas Babel has compelling, human characterizations given by most of its fleet of performers (Pitt and Blanchett aside), Crash has a drone of B-listers who try to throw out social commentary with such wooden dialogue that you expect it to fall onto the theater floor. It is, without a doubt, the most overrated film of the decade.

Unfortunately, Babel bears too much of a resemblance to Crash to make the film a worthwhile investment. If the film had gone the way of Traffic and given love and care to each of its stories, the film would have been a fine, microscopic glare at the complexities of immigration. As it is, it's no better than a two-hour nap.