When Robert De Niro speaks, people listen. Well, unless he’s
starring in The Adventures of Rocky &
Bullwinkle. Then, not so much — then they snicker, or shake their head. But
when a couple years ago De Niro put the word out that, specifically, he wanted
for his young Tribeca Film Festival, which just celebrated its fifth
anniversary, submissions dealing with the aftermath of Sept. 11, well, people
listened, particularly young filmmakers. A 2005 entry in the festival, The Great New Wonderful feels like the
perfectly mannered indie response to such an entreaty.
Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle also to his credit), The Great New Wonderful is set in 2002,
in the omnipresent but unmentioned aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the
It’s a movie that’s all about rage — bottled, transmuted and otherwise refracted.
To this end, its characters are a disparate collection of somewhat inscrutable
folks.
high-end party pastry peddler who lives in a parallel material-emotional cocoon
alongside her husband Danny (Will Arnett). There’s Sandie (Jim Gaffigan), a genial
office drone who suffers a series of work-mandated meetings with a psychologist
(pricelessly played by Tony Shalhoub) who attempts to bait him into acting out
by prodding him with dispassionate professional “observations” like, “You’re
full of rage. Is that the little man inside your head?” There’s also David and
Allison Burbage (Tom McCarthy and Judy Greer, respectively), a young married
couple who try to cope with the aggressive acting out of their elementary
school aged son, Charlie (Bill Donner). Other strands center around an elderly
lady (Olympia Dukakis) who reconnects with an old high school classmate, and two
security guards, Avi and Satish (Naseeruddin Shah and Sharat Saxena,
respectively), one of whom is stricken with misplaced aggression.
laughs popping up from unexpected places — in young Charlie’s surly behavior at
a school geography bee, or when one character holds forth in rambling fashion about
“blousy, Emma Thompson-y dresses.” But Leiner too often pauses to ironically
frame the movie’s quirks, and the music flits from off-kilter incongruous (Bob
Seger’s “Night Moves” pops up on the radio) to heartbreakingly plaintive (The
Wrens’ “This Is Not What You Had Planned”). All of this combines to make the
film feel overly self-conscious — keeping the audience at arms’ length from
these characters, just as they in turn do with their emotions and feelings.
There are some prosaic charms to be found in The Great New Wonderful, but it frequently feels willfully vague
and indistinct, reaching wanly for a fuzzy, blanket profundity while not bothering
to color within the lines of its own cozy narrative. (First
Independent, R, 86 mins.)