The Great New Wonderful and the Can't Miss List

I'm about ready to add Maggie Gyllenhaal to the Can't Miss List, actresses whose work I seek out no matter how good or bad the movie around them may be. Julianne Moore and Toni Collette are on the list so far, and I'm sure I have similar list for actors but somehow I don't seem to think about it as much.

In The Great New Wonderful (d. Danny Leiner) Gyllenhaal plays Emme, a cake designer living in New York a year after 9/11. The film is about how 9/11 has affected everyone a year later. It's one of those ensemble films where most of the characters never even meet. Standouts in the large cast include Tom McCarthy and Judy Greer as parents of a troubled child (Stephen Colbert cameos as a school headmaster) and Naseeruddin Shah from Monsoon Wedding as a security guard.

Emme's story arc involves preparations to pitch cake ideas to a high-society family for a teenage birthday party. A rival designer (Edie Falco) has won the job several years in a row and is apparently the only thing standing between Emme and career supremacy. If The Great New Wonderful has a overarching theme, I suppose it's that a year after 9/11 everything (for these characters) was basically the same, so get on with fixing the problems of your own life.

There's a scene in the first season of the FX show Rescue Me where one of the firemen goes to a 9/11 support group and finds that he's the only one there personally touched by the tragedy. I was reminded of that scene while watching this movie, since 9/11 (never referred to directly) lurks in the background but isn't connected to the story in a dramatically satisfying way.

Gyllenhaal makes something out of her fifth-of-a-movie though. Emme begins to be bothered by the superficiality of her life, and the turning point comes at the birthday party. A child singing karaoke to Sarah Maclachlan's "Ice Cream" triggers a flood of tears. On the commentary track, director Leiner and writer Sam Catlin note that the script was inspired by a couple of Catlin's plays soldered into one story.

A whole movie devoted to Emme's journey could have been quite powerful, but in the quest to say everything the makers of The Great New Wonderful have said very little.