I cannot remember exactly what I said in my introduction to my podcast interview with The Great New Wonderful‘s director Danny Leiner, but I vaguely recall intoning something about its alchemy of mourning and irony as well as the more conspicuous chemistry of an ensemble cast fusing the film’s five story threads. Which is totally abstract, I know, but so is Wonderful, which follows its storylines through the emo-cultural haze of post-9/11 New York–mostly without specific reference to the date and its tragedy.

Piece of cake: Danny Leiner coaching Maggie Gyllenhaal on the set of The Great New Wonderful (Photo: Juliana Thomas / First Independent Pictures)
Instead, Leiner and screenwriter Sam Catlin posit the attacks’ first anniversary as a barometer of middle-class anxiety. Beyond an unspoken dread of the calendar once again reading Sept. 11, the characters in Wonderful seem stunned by the reality that the day changed everything and nothing. “Are we happier?” Olympia Dukakis’s reticent, routinized hausfrau seems to wonder. “Are we safer?” wonder a pair of Indian bodyguards whose own emotions represent their worst enemies. “Have we grown?” asks an ambitious pastry chef (Maggie Gyllenhaal) desperately scaling the professional ranks. “Do we still know each other?” is the question that plagues a 30-something married couple struggling with their violent, asthmatic 10-year-old son, while Tony Shalhoub’s droll therapist confronts his patient with the query 9/11 provoked in all of us: “Do you even know yourself?”
All important questions, of course, even if, in the end, Wonderful‘s implications are a bit too fragile to effectively spread this thin (you almost sense that were it not for the priceless Stephen Colbert cameos at its center, Leiner might have cut the frazzled-parents storyline). Shalhoub and Gyllenhaal’s sangfroid case studies generate much of the film’s momentum; in particular, the latter’s exchange with cake competitor Edie Falco exquisitely frames the New Yorker’s immediate post-9/11 dilemma of balancing hard-driving nature with banal, disingenuous unity. In Dukakis’s case, her loveless marriage and discreetly roving eye seem too easy a metaphor for life’s brevity; it is not until her heartbreak provokes her to rage that Leiner calculates the opportunity cost our institutions (brick-and-mortar and otherwise) impose on individuals.
It might have taken 9/11 and its aftermath to get Leiner and Catlin to evaluate such phenomena, but their emphasis on character effectively sidesteps exploitation and gimmickry. It also lightens the viewer’s emotional load: They probably could just as easily remove the sporadic shots of a WTC-less Lower Manhattan and title cards featuring the anniverary date, and the film would still present an essentially engaging, bittersweet model of New Yorker malaise. Yet with the attacks and their subsequent wars so heavily anchoring the 21st-century experience, their inclusion–however allusive, abstract or flawed–reflects a risk worth taking. And, for that matter, worth viewing.
Anyway, I guess this is an exceedingly long-winded, inefficient way of saying that Leiner has his own ideas about all of this, and he talks about them with me right here. Thank you for listening.
RELATED: Great New Wonderful Premiere Has its Cake and Eats it Too (June 21, 2006)

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