'Wonderful' is a quietly rich post-9/11 study

June 23, 2006|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are never mentioned in ``The Great New Wonderful." They don't need to be. They're the eggshells on which the film's characters walk every waking moment.

This mysteriously rich, mostly wonderful comedy-drama takes place in September 2002, when the lives of its unconnected New Yorkers have returned to something that looks like normal. ``Normal" being a thin layer of tissue paper over the abyss.

The chic cake designer (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is back in her superficial rut, fretting about a rival (Edie Falco of ``The Sopranos" in a small role) and focused on the wealthy clients to whom she'll sell $1,000 confections named after Shakespearean heroines. The little old lady in Coney Island (Olympia Dukakis) goes to progressive political meetings, makes art-filled scrapbooks she puts in a drawer, and wonders why the sight of her couch-potato husband (Ed Setrakian) fills her with dread.

A pair of tense, well-intentioned yuppie parents (Judy Greer and Tom McCarthy) try to ignore the fact that their young son (Billy Donner) is a sociopathic brute. Two middle-class South Asian immigrants (Naseerudin Shah and Sharat Saxena) work a security detail for a visiting general and try to come to grips with their new country's freedoms and paradoxes.

In the film's most darkly funny tangent, a workplace grief counselor (Tony Shalhoub) conducts a series of interviews with a pleasant young man (Jim Gaffigan), probing for rage and neuroses that just aren't there. Of the many unstrung souls in ``Wonderful," Dr. Trabulous appears the most deluded, asking the perplexed Sandie if perhaps he's ever felt like giving his mother ``a good kick, or shoving her head into the ground?"

``The Great New Wonderful" -- the title comes from the name of the cake designer's company -- follows these characters around for just under 90 minutes, gleaning sharp, unexpected insights and awaiting the inevitable moments of crises. The skies are a pristine September blue. Every so often a plane lazily crosses the sky. All it takes is an elevator momentarily shuddering to a halt to get the heart screaming again.

The movie is one of those generously cast lost-souls-in-the-big-city movies along the lines of 2004's ``Heights" or 2001's ``13 Conversations About One Thing"; it's also a quieter, less melodramatic piece of work than last year's ``Crash," and arguably a better one.