'Wonderful' tacitly studies post-9/11 New Yorkers

Ty Burr, The Boston Globe

Published September 8, 2006 at midnight

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The attacks of Sept. 11 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 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) and focusing on the wealthy clients to whom she'll sell $1,000 confections. The little old lady in Coney Island (Olympia Dukakis) goes to progressive political meetings, makes scrapbooks 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 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), searching for rage and neuroses that just aren't there.

The movie follows these characters around for just under 90 minutes, gleaning sharp, unexpected insights and awaiting the inevitable moments of crises. The movie is a quieter, less melodramatic piece of work than last year's Crash, and arguably a better one.

The invisible Sept. 11 theme gives the film weight and coherence. The jagged rift that opened that day between lives of privilege and utter chaos hasn't closed; it's just studiously ignored by people who can't understand why their nerves are shot.

The film's an actor's playpen. Greer tears into her part - a smart, loving mother frightened of her own son - as if it were prime rib. Gyllenhaal allows us to recoil from her character's airy selfishness while letting us understand why it might be necessary. Dukakis plays a deft game of resentment and hope, and Shah is delightful as a man so in love with America that he's blind to its snares.

At the center is Shalhoub's Dr. Trabulous, who's a saint or a psycho or both. The actor gets nuances of bearing and behavior others don't even consider, and the royal fun he has is a rare thing.

Director Danny Leiner and writer Sam Catlin understand that even pampered New Yorkers are deserving of empathy, that everything in our culture and private lives is dedicated to burying despair, and that fear needs to be dug out and dealt with if we're ever to go forward as wiser mortals. If not, why are we even living?

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