Wednesday, August 02, 2006
The Great New Wonderful (2005)
Should Your See It? Please do. And do not be put-off because it is about the aftermath of September 11th. Leiner's work is subtle and significant.
Each summer since I began writing about movies I have stumbled upon a really terrific little film that lingers all year. Last year it was the singular charm of You, Me and Everyone We Know. A few years back it was the surprising sophistication of Tadpole. And this year it is the quiet, pensive The Great New Wonderful. Director Danny Leiner begins his films with a time stamp, September 2002. We then meet 5 disparate sets of characters – all ordinary people living in New York City. The film goes on to explore a simple scenario: show the subtle yet significant effects of September 11th's trauma on each set of characters.
I know, I know, my initial reaction was like yours. I film about 9/11? No thank you. But no, the actual events and the physical aftermath are never seen. This is a film about the subtle emotional impact looming in the background of each character’s life. No, not in the background but rather tucked just under the skin. Amazingly the events of 9/11, the motivating element of the entire film, are never directly spoken about by the characters. Yet the script and the acting are so good you can feel the horrible presence of that day lurking just behind the eyeballs, just out of reach of the finger-tips, in the back of the throat with each breathe, as the characters go on living, go on trying to be ordinary, trying to be the self they were in a life that isn’t any longer.
The lives of the five sets of characters never really intersect, so it is as much five short stories as a single film. Of the five stories I found Maggie Gyllenhaal’s most moving. She plays Emme, a high profile cake artist (receiving as much as $18,000 per cake) in competition with another cake artist, Safarah, for jobs, prestige and an upcoming gourmet prize. In one scene Emme’s ‘spies’ call her when her rival, Safarah, shows up for lunch. Emme arrives to try and find out what cake Safarah is submitting for the prize in hopes of finding some advantage. Instead of finding Safarah as ambitious and ruthless as herself, she is pensive and melancholy. “Sometimes I wonder why we go on with this frivolous work after what happened”. Safarah has been searching for something more meaningful, something to ease her depression, her disequilibrium since ‘what happened’. This little exchange is the core of Leiner’s film: what is the appropriate way to live, the appropriate way to feel after September 11th? How can I go back to my old life, my old self when the world I lived in is gone? Or is it: how do I live now that I see and feel everything differently? Safarah cannot figure it out and kills herself. Emme, who has been denying any change in herself, living as if she believed prestige and success were still what they once meant to her, is finally cast into a depressing melancholy after Safarah’s suicide. And when we leave Emme, having succeeding in winning a high profile (and lucrative) cake order, she is sitting alone, in tears wondering “how can I go on with this work after what happened?” So subtle, so beautiful, so significant.
And like Emme the other characters in The Great New Wonderful come to realize their worlds, their lives are not the same a year after ‘what happened’. Some, like Emme, are just beginning to accept they have permanently changed. Leiner captures that psychological moment of disequilibrium when these characters realize they have been denying the pain, the rage within themselves – when they realize the clique is true: everything did change on September 11th.
A quiet profound film.
