Recently viewed (twice) on DVD: "Next Stop Wonderland" (1998)

Grade: B

I’m not sure what kind of a distribution Next Stop Wonderland had when it was released in 1998, but it was completely unfamiliar to me until I viewed it with friends Saturday evening. I had several problems with the film. First, the sound was not synchronized with the picture. Second, although the movie was set in Boston, not one person spoke with that distinctive Boston "accent." (To see how the Boston patois can be well integrated into a film, I recommend Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River or Martin Scorsese’s The Departed.) Third, there was this stupid subplot involving a businessman/gangster that was never fully resolved. And finally, there was this dumb inconsistency: The lead male character has a day’s growth of whiskers throughout the film except in the final sequence on a commuter train where he's perfectly clean-shaven. However, as soon as he steps off the train, he’s seen with the scrubble again.

But the more I thought about it the more I began to think that any film starring Hope Davis and featuring even a small, supporting performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman could not be all bad. And, perhaps, I was not in the proper frame of mind for the film Saturday night. Following a day’s worth of exciting Special Olympics basketball with the adrenalin still flowing, I would have rather seen a well-made adventure film such as the recent The Hurt Locker, District 9 or Star Trek. But that was my problem, not the fault of the film.

Next Stop Wonderland is about two attractive 30-ish urbanites drifting through the city and just missing each other until fate finally allows them to connect. Throw in some half-baked mystical notions that these two lonely hearts are truly destined to be joined and you have what came across to me as a hard-to-swallow sugarcoated cliche.

But wait a minute. What if the lovers-to-be are likable, smart, complicated people who seem recognizable without being stereotypical? And what if they're surrounded by a finely observed supporting cast of friends and co-workers who collectively constitute a richly diverse group portrait of a whole stratum of urban society?

That's what I discovered Brad Anderson's film accomplishes at its frequent best and that’s what really came across on my second viewing. Weaving together the movie's many vignettes and characters is a gorgeous Brazilian-oriented soundtrack that distills the exquisite mixture of melancholy and yearning — the bossa nova mood known as "saudade" — that often defines the emotional texture of the romantically charged single life.

Next Stop Wonderland follows the romantic peregrinations of Erin Castleton (Davis), a night-shift nurse and Harvard Medical School dropout, after her politically correct boyfriend Sean (Hoffman) walks out on her, leaving behind his cat, Fidel, along with a nasty videotape listing his grievances. Erin's widowed mother, in a meddlesome attempt to play matchmaker, secretly places a gushy personal ad for her daughter in a newspaper that flaunts several inaccurate adjectives, including "frisky."

As pointed out by one of the guests at Saturday’s viewing, the movie's best comic moments are amusing snippets of Erin's meetings in a bar with a motley array of prospective suitors. As they obsequiously spew their lines, Erin takes it all in with a cool, enigmatic reserve. (In many shots she resembles a younger Hillary Rodham Clinton.) These suitors range from a motor-mouthed salesman to a taciturn psychotherapist to a businessman whose concealed wedding ring accidentally drops out of his wallet. The funniest is an executive with pathetic bravado who touts the global importance of the small rubber parts his company manufactures. Also among the suitors is a group of friends who make a bet on which of them will be the first to make love to Erin. Discovering their plot, she devises a delicious comic revenge.

Erin's future lover, Alan Monteiro (Alan Gelfant), with whom she rubs elbows on the subway more than once without their connecting, is a financially beleaguered East Boston plumber who works in an aquarium and is studying to be a marine biologist. Unlike Erin, who is always on the brink of a sulk, Alan seems a little too good to be true. Working-class but refined, he is the only man Erin meets who cites the proper source (Ralph Waldo Emerson) for a quotation that is reiterated by various suitors (and continually misattributed) until it becomes a comic leitmotif.

Before Erin and Alan connect, each is diverted by other potential partners. At her hospital, Erin meets a suave Brazilian ethnomusicologist (Jose Zuniga) who pursues her avidly and begs her to fly with him to Sao Paulo. Alan is pursued even more vigorously by Julie (Cara Buono), his attractive airheaded study partner, who literally throws herself at him.

What I finally realized is that Next Stop Wonderland isn't really much more than a beautifully acted, finely edited sitcom, but it creates and sustains an intelligent, seriocomic mood better than most films about the urban single life. If the movie at moments recalls As Good as It Gets, its characters are subtler and its vision of humanity more truthful.

No, it doesn't have barnstorming performances by actors chewing the scenery while engaging in brassy psychological combat. Davis's Erin is not the kind of woman who lets all her emotions hang out. She is an introvert, a type that the movies rarely embrace unless that character turns out to be a raving lunatic.

With its smart savvy dialogue (some of it is so good it sounds overheard) and close attention to the minutiae of body language and facial expressions, it reminds you of how in an urban contemporary movie, the details are almost everything.