The Man is a ball buster and a back breaker. From the balcony of his penthouse suite in a steel and glass tower, he throws bricks of misfortune down at schmucks like us, cackling all the while like an overweight oil baron and smoking a cigar made of $100 bills. We're the replaceable cogs in his corporate machine, the serfs in his feudal consumerist kingdom. His grip on us is like a Chinese finger trap—the more we struggle, the tighter it gets. He's a white-collar pickpocket, a black-suited extortionist, and we're all basically paying with our lives for the honor of shining his $3,000 patent leather shoes. To belabor the point with one more metaphor, The Man has our souls to his grindstone, and he's…slowly…wearing…us…down. That's one view, anyway. The other would be that The Man is just a scapegoat, an excuse for our unhappiness and lack of ambition, a made-up justification for our regrets, the falsified pretext for our tar-black cynicism. Wonderful World, a little redemption fable of a film by first-time director Joshua Goldin, is all about examining both sides of the coin. Even the title is a kind of litmus test. Is it Wonderful World, or "Wonderful" World?
Matthew Broderick plays Ben Singer, a perhaps too aptly named former children's folk singer who put away his guitar for good eight years ago after his record company royally screwed him over. Since then, he's been slumming through a dead-end job as a legal proofreader—"At least I don't delude myself with hopes and dreams," he says, too tired to sneer—and he's developed a ceaselessly misanthropic attitude. He's the very definition of a sad sack, an embittered ex-artist who had his passion squelched by a culture of corporate greed. At night, his brain fogged with marijuana smoke, he carries on Socratic, hallucinated conversations with The Man himself, personified here by Philip Baker Hall. Ben is divorced from his wife, he rarely sees his precocious young daughter (Jodelle Ferland), and his only real friend is his roommate Ibou (The Wire's Michael K. Williams), a dangerously diabetic Senegalese immigrant. When Ibou falls into a coma because Ben can't get him to the hospital on time—conveniently for the plot, a city tow truck hauls Ben's car away right when Ibou starts to feel faint—his sister Khadi (Sanaa Lathan) arrives from Africa to pull the dark-tinted glasses off of Ben's worldview. What follows is a jumble of romance and misread intentions, as Ben grapples with his own cynicism even as he begins to fall in love.For all of Ben's weary sarcasm and defeatist quips, Wonderful World is an almost painfully earnest film, the kind of well-intentioned indie drama that isn't out to make a buck or garner awards, but rather, seems content to tell its small story with a totally unassuming tone. No matter what its faults may be—and we'll get to those in a second—this isn't the sort of film that you can endlessly rag on or passionately hate. It's like that super friendly but ultimately uninteresting guy who lived on your floor in college, the one whose name you can't remember. He might not have been the kind of person you'd necessarily want to be friends with, but he was impossible to dislike. That's Wonderful World, a good-natured low-budget film that doesn't quite accomplish what it sets out to do, but tries with such honest modesty that its failures seem almost gracious. The main malfunction here is director Joshua Goldin's scatterbrained script, which lunges off on narrative tangents but often double back before taking them to gratifying conclusions. Case in point, Ben's lawsuit against the city for "depraved indifference," a sequence that garbs itself in such flamboyant courtroom clich้s that it almost seems self-parodying. Even Ben's railings against The Man, consumerism, and the power of positive thinking sound tired, not because of the lie down and die point he's trying to make, but because we've heard it all before. At its best, Wonderful World is tender and mildly triumphant, but at its worst—in Ben's conversations with The Man, for instance—it's baldly didactic, preachier than a Sunday sermon.The plot also swings on a worn-out thematic hinge. How many times have we seen a white Westerner find redemption with the help of a soulful African who's monetarily poor but rich in spirit? When played too pointedly, as it is here, the trope comes off as more than a little condescending, a narrative leftover of post-colonialist guilt. But I don't think that's director Joshua Goldin's intent. He really does find simple, unadulterated joy in Khadi shaking her hips in a sensuous Senegalese dance or fixing Ben a meal of Wolof soul food. The relationship that develops between the two is never entirely convincing, but you do get an insuppressible satisfaction in seeing Ben finally crack a smile, the structural integrity of his self-imposed fortress of solitude compromised at last. Broderick is nicely cast here—his baby face covered in a five o'clock shadow of complete social indifference—and he manages to find that balance of being just flawed enough as a character to need redemption, but not so unlikable as not to deserve it. His fellow cast members do what they can—Sanaa Lathan alternately glows and glowers, and Michael K. Williams plays Ibou as both wise and na๏ve—but the affected accents and the clumsiness of the dialogue certainly don't work in anyone's favor. The film falters under stereotypes and a message that's a little too obvious, but it's hard to be too cynical about Wonderful World.
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