John Sayles possesses many gifts as a filmmaker, but none greater than his ability to dive into a community and explore how it works. Apart from a couple of misfires, last year's Sunshine State among the most notable, his approach of collecting characters and letting them interact with one another until they reveal the world around them almost always works. Sayles' latest, Casa De Los Babys, features two communities, one makeshift and one permanent. The former is a group of six women seeking to adopt children from an unnamed Latin American country, kept together by red tape for an indeterminate stay. The latter is the cottage industry that has developed around their need, a network connecting the local orphanage to the resident lawyer to the hotel of the title, a resort/holding pen overseen by Rita Moreno. The potential parents vary from quiet fitness buff Daryl Hannah to the shrill, unstable Marcia Gay Harden, with Maggie Gyllenhaal, Lili Taylor, Susan Lynch, and Sayles regular Mary Steenburgen filling in the shades between. Seldom content to work on a small canvas, Sayles throws in local street children, a barely reformed revolutionary, an unemployed construction worker acting as a tour guide, and others, all forming an evenhanded depiction of maternal need brushing up against the Third World's difficult relationship with its more prosperous neighbors. It's a bit more than the film can handle without leaving loose ends dangling, and though it's never preachy, Sayles' political message-sending sometimes comes across too clearly for its own good. He makes valid points, though, particularly when he lets his storytelling do the work for him, as in a remarkable scene that piles two monologues on top of each other, one delivered by Lynch, the other by a hotel maid played by Vanessa Martinez. Neither fully understands the other, but for a brief moment they make a connection that captures the need, desperation, and sadness of an arrangement that, whatever good may come of it, exacts a cost that extends beyond lawyers' fees and plane tickets.