Barring future scientific discoveries, the movies remain the closest thing to time traveling. In the first few moments of Happy Accidents, Brad Anderson demonstrates the medium’s versatility in this regard: time is reversed, slowed down, speeded up, frozen, flashed back and forward. Anderson’s expertise is not just metaphysical, either — it’s also emotional, and the fusion of the two modes, despite some lapses, makes for the brightest romantic comedy of a dim year.

That fusion of emotion and metaphysics also sparks Accidents’ hero, the Capra-esque Sam Deed (Vincent D’Onofrio, a beefier and more bonkers Gary Cooper), a flaky Manhattan hospice worker who has taken a shine to perky Ruby Weaver (Marisa Tomei in a dazzling performance). Sam isn’t your average moonstruck screwball. He believes he’s a time traveler from the year 2470 who has " backtraveled " in order to unite with Ruby and break an invidious causal chain that keeps them repeatedly, and forever, apart. How to do this? In theory, a surge of emotion — love, for choice — can thwart the ironclad laws of the space/time continuum.

At least that’s one of the progressively more convoluted and bizarre tales Sam spins for poor Ruby, who’s already stuck in her own temporal loop of repetition compulsion. She and her girlfriends gather to rue past lovers who have lured them in only to drop the inevitable dysfunctional bombshell — Jews for Jesus, fetishists, bad drummers. The girls laugh and toss the losers’ photos into a box labeled " Ex files. " Ruby’s contributed more than her share — though most of them have hidden pasts, not unlikely futures. Either way, she’s co-dependent, an enabler of wounded, lost, immature men.

That’s what her therapist (Holland Taylor) tells her, anyway, and she and Ruby’s best friend, Gretchen (Nadia Dajani), try to talk Ruby into adding Sam’s picture to the box. Viewers will probably start wishing that Ruby would drop both her interlocutors in as well, since the film jumps from one exasperated confession to another, intercut with flashbacks narrated by Ruby’s voiceover. At first the overlapping scenes flow with wit and clarity, but after a while things get glib and curdled. Forget about 2470, when and where are we now?

Adding to the contrivance and confusion are Sam’s tortured explanations. Like his supposedly phony " back " story (a troubled family in present-day Dubuque, Iowa, on the banks of the Mississippi), his dubious " forward " story (a troubled family in 25th-century Dubuque, Iowa, on the Atlantic coast), his account of the next four centuries of future history involving " Gene Dupes, " " Biologicals, " and " Anachronists, " the time-travel theories of yet unborn scientific pioneers with names like Cheeseman, his obsessive sketches of a pretty brunette and doodlings of the name " Chrystie Delancey, " his fear of small dogs, and the mystery phone number on the back of a " family " photo. Some of this is clever, spoofing both sci-fi conventions and self-help therapy, as if The Terminator had got stuck in a genre warp with Annie Hall. Some, though, is like the " temporal drag " that Sam succumbs to from time to time: it sends his perceptions into reverse gear and threatens to do so permanently. What’s ironic, for a film about the nature of time, is that Happy Accidents goes on too long.

Mostly, though, the film lives up to its title. Blithe and compelling, it unfolds with a sense of the unexpected and the inevitable. The premise and the logistics possess far more elegance and plausibility than, say, Planet of the Apes, but more important, the mechanics are secondary to the scenario of two souls who meet by chance or fate and against all odds cleave in the limbo between past and future. In short, romantic comedy in its purest form.

That seems to be the genre that Anderson was born to work in (the humorless Session 9, which came out a couple weeks ago, has style but little else). He could do worse. It allows him to exploit the metaphysics of the medium, the games it can play with fate, synchronicity, and time. Happy Accidents represents an exponential advance over his previous effort in the genre, Next Stop Wonderland; the opening and closing segments alone attain the poetry of Chris Marker’s La Jetée. The film’s easy laughter darkens into the uneasy recognition that we are all time travelers, with only the slender thread of love to guide us through the void.

Issue Date: August 23-30, 2001