Brad Pitt in Babel

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu can be counted among the charmed circle of directors who have mastered the ability to step back and see the larger picture.

Inarritu, who linked disparate Mexico City dwellers in "Amores Perros" and socially stratified Americans in "21 Grams," connects the dots on a global canvas in his third and most accomplished collaboration with writer Guillermo Arriaga. To judge from the attentive hush that greeted the New York screening of "Babel" that I attended and the satchel of international festival prizes that heralded its arrival, Inarritu's got the whole world in the palm of his hands.

Just as a car accident served as the leveler of a diverse humanity in "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," a shooting incident bridges the geographical and social divide among four families in "Babel." In a rural community of Morocco, adolescent brothers Ahmed and Yussef (Said Tarchani and Boubker Ait El Caid) squabble for bragging rights to a rifle purchased by their father. Goaded by his brother, crack shot Yussef aims at a bus full of tourists and winds up landing his mark.

His victim is a San Diego resident, Susan (Cate Blanchett), on a Morocco tour with her husband Richard (Brad Pitt) in an attempt to heal tensions engendered by a family tragedy. As Richard struggles to mollify his uncooperative fellow tourists and find medical help for his wife, their Mexican nanny Amelia (the heartbreaking Adriana Barraza) travels with their two young children and her excitable nephew Santiago (Gael Garc?-a Bernal) across the border to attend her son's wedding.

In a fourth scenario, set in Tokyo, a woman's suicide haunts her grieving husband Yasujiro (Koji Yakusho) and deaf-mute daughter Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi, in a remarkable performance), who responds to the loss in sexually provocative ways. This plot line initially strikes us as a kind of narrative non sequitur; the question of how it relates to the rest of the puzzle only adds to the film's page-turner momentum.

Inarritu's greatest talent as a celluloid storyteller is the effortless, at times alarming, fluidity with which he shifts between locales, tipping us off in the process to the common rites that bind cultures.

This paralleling technique is put to arresting effect as the drunken ecstasy of a wedding party in Mexico is played off the bacchanalian delirium of a Tokyo dance club. Inarritu brilliantly puts us inside Chieko's experience of this clamorous environment by shutting the music's volume with disorienting abruptness.

The dramatic propulsion and thematic continuity that Inarritu achieves via manipulation of images is often so dazzling, one tends to overlook the script's pat or melodramatic aspects. One might question the need for not one but two domestic rapprochements at journey's end, even as one appreciates his instinct to leave us on a note of hope. If "Babel" falls an inch or three short of greatness, it's always a great ride.