The Great New Wonderful

Post-Crash, we'll probably be seeing a lot more ensemble anthology-style dramas, in which unrelated characters conduct multiple, thematically-linked plots. Personally, I'm not a fan of the genre. For every Nashville, in which Robert Altman simultaneously tells dozens of humorous and intriguing stories, there's three or four movies like The Great New Wonderful, aimless mood pieces that impatiently flit between uninteresting half-thoughts in a desperate search for some kind of Universal Truth.

That's really the Big Lie about this kind of storytelling. Relating a string of unrelated, and unfortunately mundane, mini-stories over the course of a single film neccessarily implies that there is some kind of buried revelation to be gleaned. Watching these individuals work through their problems will lead us to an epiphany that can be applied not only to all the film's characters, but to everyday life as well.

It's the Raymond Carver school of storytelling. There's no time to delve into a lot of backstory or exposition. With five different characters to keep up with in 87 minutes, everyone's only given one basic conflict or scenario to work out. So small slices-of-life, moments taken out of context, have to stand in for the whole range of human experience. In the hands of an Altman, Michael Powell or, say, Max Ophuls, this kind of experiment can work out quite well, taking the viewer on an emotional journey of discovery in which seemingly disparate narratives congeal into one singular, and original, perspective. (Ophuls' La Ronde, regrettably not available on DVD, is one such masterpiece.)

Danny Leiner has already made one great film - Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle - so I suppose he has every reason to feel ambitious. But his direct-to-DVD disappointment The Great New Wonderful represents almost everything unpleasant and misguided about these kinds of treacly anthology dramas (TAD's). It's maudlin, undercooked, scattered and boring. That would all be bad enough, but Sam Catlin's woeful script makes the added mistake of tying his generic plot machinations to the September 11th attacks. Just as Catlin's characters must reassess their lives and find ways to evolve, so too must the city of New York heal itself from the wounds inflicted by those al-Qaida bastards.

Um, no, Danny. No. That's not gonna work for me.

Some of you may have noticed that I like Spike Lee's The 25th Hour, which does in fact do this veryt same thing (and much closer to the actual 9/11 tragedy than The Great New Wonderful), and may be thinking that I am a hypocrite. Please allow me to explain. 9/11 does not serve as a focal point for The 25th Hour. The film is set in New York, and Lee uses the remnants and evidence of 9/11 as yet another way of presenting life in his favorite city. The environment, the background, has changed slightly - now the Irish bars have tributes to dead firemen and the lavish penthouses overlook Ground Zero - but the lives of New Yorkers presses on.

The Great New Wonderful uses 9/11 to advance its rather simplistic theme. The World Trade Center is like a fucked up, confused person. Badly damaged and ready to topple over. But just like we went in and cleaned up the WTC site and are building a memorial, so too must a person pick themselves up and blah blah blah cut me a fucking break. Spike Lee's made some reductive, overly-simplistic films before (He Got Game?), but I don't think he's ever made anything that vapid.



There's just not enough time to tell five effective stories in an 87 minute movie. That's what all this boils down to. Crash, among its myriad failings, also suffered from a lack of development. 90 minutes is the average time for movies (or was before Peter Jackson lost his damn mind) for a really good reason. You need around that much time to establish characters, set an intricate plot in motion, devise a few interconnected subplots and develop a theme.

Why would anyone think that it's reasonable to try and do this five separate times all in one movie? It's a herculean task. For some reason, TAD's tend to attract first-time screenwriters. (Full disclosure: one of the first scripts I wrote, which I have never showed anyone, was a dreadful TAD set at UCLA in which one character was stuck in an elevator for the entire film). I don't know why someone who has never written a movie in which only one set of events occur would want to tackle six or more simultaneous events.

Perhaps because skipping around between stories sounds easier. You don't have to give any of the stories real depth or nuance, you don't have to come up with a full three-act strucutre for the narrative, and your characters don't have to be interesting enough to keep an audience's attention for 90 minutes. You can have mildly interesting stuff go on, but just keep everything in constant motion.

I have no idea. Anyway, it usually doesn't work, and The Great New Wonderful doesn't stand out in this regard.

The best of the stories stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as the rising star of New York's Designer Cake scene, who both resents and idolizes the Martha Stewart-esque Grand Dame of Cakery (Edie Falco). These two actresses get one scene together - a gossipy, catty run-in at a posh eatery - and it's by far the best moment in the movie. It has personality because the characters have an actual dynamic. They have so much in common and clearly enjoy one another, but they're also fiercely competitive and increasingly bitter as the excitement begins to fade from their high-stress profession. This is Falco's only scene in the film, and she brings more contradictions and intrigue to Safarah than the rest of the actors do with triple her screen time.

Just about every other scene falls flat on its ass. Catlin's dialogue fills the movie wall-to-wall. Characters are always talking about something, often little snippets of chatty small talk such as you would engage in with co-workers or fellow Moms watching their toddlers at the playground. These conversations are either dull or irritating.

Judy Greer plays Emme, the mother of a troubled, angry, mean-spirited fat boy named Charlie. She spends the entire film in her underwear arguing with her husband about their wayward son, but the conversations never go anywhere. Charlie's behavior remains enigmatic throughout the film, and when a peculiar school principal (Stephen Colbert, apparently instructed to turn off his generally spot-on comic timing for a dull supporting role) suggests that they simply send their child "away," it's not really all that surprising. The boy is never anything more than a pest. Why not remove him?

Other stories work themselves out in similarly neat, uninspired fashion. Judie (Olympia Dukakis) hates her husband's nightly routine of eating sandwiches, watching TV and then having a cigarette outside. So she considers cheating on him with another old fart. The talkative Avi (Naseeruddin Shah) bickers with his uptight friend Satish (Sharat Saxena) while they provide security for a visiting Indian diplomat, leading to an ambiguous and quite frankly baffling conclusion.

But the film's oddest tangent concerns Tony Shalhoub as an insane psychologist and Jim Gaffigan as his perplexed new patient. The dialogue here, as well as the moody score by Brett Boyett and John Swihart, has clearly been inspired by Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's Being John Malkovich. Shalhoub confronts Gaffigan about his out-of-control anger, despite the patient's apparent ease, calm and rationality. Scenes between these two pop up throughout the film and follow the same pattern - Shalhoub throws out some nonsensical idea about Gaffigan's behavior, Gaffigan responds with surprise - and it's eventually quite irritating. These scenes, above all, could have used some actual comedy to keep things moving. Catlin and Leiner rely largely on their cast to spontaneously generate big laughs out of unfunny material, forgetting that Louis Pasteur debunked the concept of spontaneous generation back in 1859.

To his credit, Leiner doesn't forcibly connect the dots, spelling out precisely what his movie is "all about." In that way, it's a considerable improvement on Haggis' Crash, which so explicitly laid out his every last platform and deeply held political belief, you almost thought the guy was running for City Councilman. That movie's more sanctimonious than Hugh Hewitt liveblogging an interview of Billy Graham by Rush Limbaugh in the auditorium of Bob Jones University on the subject of "Girls Gone Wild" DVD's.

So, anyway, Leiner just feel the need to spell eveything out so blatantly, which does allow for a few well-played little moments here and there. Shalhoub makes an early prediction that comes true by the end of the movie, which Leiner confirms with a single, static shot that's perfectly timed. Shah and Saxena have a very natural give-and-take relationship, and theirs is a far more realistic depiction of male friendship than generally appears in films. Too bad their story doesnt' go anywhere at all.

And as I said before, that scene with Gyllenhaal and Falco is pretty terrific. I would watch an entire film about Falco's character.

But the movie's all sum, no parts. There are some essential grounding themes and some interesting enough ideas, but most of the movie consists of uninteresting, flat conversations. There's carefully realized dialogue and then there's just dithering around, waiting for a story to develop. The Great New Wonderful has its moments, but doesn't give you any good reason to stay tuned until they arrive.