Happy Accidents

We go into movie theaters ready and eager to believe the extraordinary. The two people who just collided in the park will soon find themselves to be the perfect couple. The action hero will conquer a compound full of enemies with his guile and his gun. The film in which Tom Arnold is starring will be entertaining. Brad Anderson, writer, editor and director of the new film "Happy Accidents," is a smart man, and knows that we expect something unexpected when we pay our money and take our seats.

So when Anderson's hero Sam Deed (Vincent D'Onofrio) tells his lover Ruby Weaver (Marisa Tomei), after a couple months of pleasant but slightly odd life together in their Manhattan apartment, that he's not from our Dubuque, Iowa but from the Dubuque, Iowa of the year 2470 A.D., we are prepared to believe him. Ruby, understandably, is not.

But "Happy Accidents" is not the quirky romantic comedy its title and plot synopsis suggest, as we know when it opens in medias res during a tense therapy session. Belief may not come at all for Ruby, and if it does, it will come with the utmost difficulty. And it is this issue of how, why and what we decide to believe which concerns Anderson, as well as assorted problems of time, death, memory, love and fate. What results is a brilliant film, well-acted, philosophically inquisitive and deeply human, and riveting from beginning to end.

Sam knows that Ruby will not give the time of day to a stranger who walks up to her and tells her that he's a time traveler from the twenty-fifth century, fleeing a world where the Great Infestation has wiped out all non-human life forms, genetic duplicates manufactured in the Philippines form the majority of the "human" population, and people who believe that the past has something to teach the future are ostracized as Anachronists. (One can see why he would want to leave.)

But he also knows that he doesn't fit in at all in New York City, 1999, and he further knows that he does desperately want Ruby to give him the time of day. So he breaks it to her gradually. First he's from Dubuque, which explains some amount of bewilderment and discomfort in millennial Manhattan. Then he's from Dubuque, 2470. And there are other, more subtle and more disturbing revelations to come, as time becomes tricky and memory even more so.

Ruby has suspected that something is wrong, as has the audience. In D'Onofrio's performance, even Sam's movements aren't quite right; his upper body is massive and trustworthy, but his lower body seems subtly skittish, almost as if it's uncertain about where to put his torso. Sam's sentences begin uncertainly, but end as if he has gained confidence by speaking them. And he's as open as he is mysterious; he seems just trustworthy enough each time he tells her something, and he is thoughtful and kind and unafraid of his emotions and apparently makes exquisite love to her. One can see why Ruby would desperately want to find an excuse to give this relationship a chance to work.

But, for Ruby, finding an excuse is desperate work. Sam's struggles are certainly not given short shrift; when one of Ruby's friends jokingly asks what the future will be like and Sam plays a loud, high-pitched, oppressive tone with a wetted finger on the rim of a wineglass, it's a high point in the film. But the bulk of Anderson's interest is in Ruby, and Tomei gives a performance worth paying attention to.

Ruby's therapist and friends advise her to dump Sam, and she isn't fully confident in her own desires, because she has been burned before in love by what amounts to self-destructive credulity. It would take a truly spectacular credulity to believe Sam's story. Faced with an impossible dilemma, Ruby tries to believe it while not believing it, making it into a game, a sickness, anything but the truth.

Tomei makes all this palpable and affecting with her not-beautiful but soulful face, her posture as it moves gradually between uncertainly straight and utterly spent, and a heretofore unsuspected gift for unnervingly nervous smiling. Tomei is asked to spend much of the film in hysterics of various kinds, and she manages to texture them, creating a symphony of differently pitched emotions where many actresses would settle for one note. She's watchable and likable and completely sympathetic even as she goes against what we, as a movie audience, want her to do. If it's possible to retroactively transfer Academy Awards, perhaps hers could be switched from "My Cousin Vinny" to this film.

Anderson's work as screenwriter and director equals the work of his leading thespians. His direction is utterly natural except when he depicts the unnatural, as when he shows Ruby trying to imagine Sam's memories; his imagination is sensitive enough that even these flights seem true. He plays with time as much as his characters do, but with far greater fluency, and there is a thrilling sense of capital-F Fate closing in on the characters as events move to a close. Philosophical issues arise naturally from the premise, and are handled with skill and humanity, but the wrenching emotions of the story always take their place at the front.

The main virtue of this film is that there is nothing glib in it, no sentiments summarized overly neatly, no easy answers to the difficult questions which Anderson raises. But "Happy Accidents" proves hard answers earned honestly and intelligently are far more satisfying and entertaining than the facile resolutions of lesser cinema could ever be. Go see this film. You'll be happy you did, and it'll be anything but an accident.

This was the first review of mine to appear after September 11, 2001; I sent it in to the paper and to the list on September 10. It looked really weird in the paper there—so frivolous at that time. But a couple people mentioned that it was a good review. I don't know whether they were just relieved to have an excuse to read something frivolous, or whether it was actually well written. I still really like the movie.

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