"The Great New Wonderful"
I watched it Friday night. Insightful, funny, powerful emsemble dramedy.
Netflix describes it as:
New York City a year after the 9/11 tragedy is the setting for Danny Leiner's comedy portraying five stories of vastly different lives in the same uncertain surroundings. A psychologist (Tony Shalhoub) and an ordinary yet angry man; two pastry purveyors (Maggie Gyllenhaal and Edie Falco); a married couple; two immigrant friends; and an older woman (Olympia Dukakis) set in her ways -- they all try to rebuild their lives as the city does as well.
It sounds like another too-soon, not-interested 9/11 movie but this is a movie that smartly neglects to show any footage from September 11, 2001, real or recreated because it knows it doesn't need to. The horrifying images from 9/11 are burned on our brain already and the depiction of a distant, innocent plane against a blue sky one year later is the perfect pin prick to put the story into a Post-9/11 context without recalling a flood of visions that would drown out the quiet subtleties of the movie, not to mention it's surprising humor. Which is not to say that this movie is not as upsetting as "World Trade Center" or "Flight 93" probably were to those that saw them. It's just that "The Great New Wonderful" sneaks up on you. I didn't feel overly emotional at any point in the movie and I was nowhere near tears. For a while, I was even wondering what any of it had to do with 9/11. Yet I couldn't manage more than two hours of sleep Friday night.
Here is a review that explains it much better than I do:
http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movie&id=9151
1 comment:
saw this recently as well. really liked olympia dukakis' situation...favorite line was from colbert: "your son's heart is made of shit and splinters." yeow!
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