What surfaces in "Babel" is a feverish, desperate desire for communication. Comprised of four segments spanning three continents in locations as disparate as Morocco and Tokyo, the characters make phone calls, text message, weep, kiss and clutch at each other's arms. The need to reach out is so palpable that it hurts; the main emotion recalled by the film is a great, protracted longing -- for understanding, closeness, that magical moment of actually connecting with someone else. At the same time you realize, too, the difficulty of this undertaking.
"Babel" opens with a scene of a Moroccan father handing a high-powered rifle to his two sons and instructing them to shoot when a jackal comes near their goat herd. He neglects to tell them anything else before going to work, and the boys (aged 11 and 13) take pot-shots at rocks, the sky and then at a tour bus on a mountain road below them. A bullet penetrates one of the windows and the collarbone of American tourist named Susan (Cate Blanchett), who is on vacation with her husband Richard (Brad Pitt).
The couple had come to Morocco to mend their faltering marriage, but until this point their relations had consisted of quiet bickering and dense silences. This out-of-the-blue, random wounding, however, spurs the laconic Richard into action. He turns into the archetypal demanding American, barking orders to the Moroccan tour-bus guide and, when they manage to stop at a nearby village, yelling down a bad phone line for "immediate help, now, right NOW!" In the meantime, the Moroccan father learns from his two sons what has happened. His features decompose into a pool of despair and resignation. He knows the authorities will show no mercy -- the only course of action is flight and, taking his sons, he abandons their home.