SPOILER ALERT

Set in Manhattan just before the first anniversary, The Great New Wonderful traces the impact of September 11th on the lives of people not directly affected by the attacks. We watch as hairline fractures slowly become compound under the unspecifiable stress.

The script by Sam Catlin hops back and forth among five stories: Sandie (Jim Gaffigan), a low-level white-collar worker who knew a group of people killed that day, resists the ambiguously elliptical grief counseling of Dr. Trabulous (Tony Shalhoub); Emme (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a gourmet pastry chef, goes after a birthday-cake commission that could put her in the big leagues; David (Tom McCarthy) and Allison (Judy Greer) struggle to conserve the heat of their marriage while dealing with their grade schooler's increasingly violent behavior; Judie (Olympia Dukakis), who has long accepted the numbing routine of her marriage, reconnects with a high school classmate and thinks she's on the verge of an adventure; and Avi (Naseeruddin Shah) and Satish (Sharat Saxena), two Hindu-American bodyguards, try to keep their equilibrium as Satish turns moody and Avi frivolous.

The characters cover the span from working-class immigrants to a glamorous young entrepreneur poised on the brink of money and celebrity — people who toil to maintain their stake in what can be an unforgiving metropolis even absent trauma. The movie thus offers a middle-class panorama suggestive of epic ambitions. There are two pitfalls to this kind of material: summarizing the subject too neatly or treating it too diffusely. The ideal is Robert Altman's Nashville, in which the 24 characters involved in the country-music scene converge at a grassroots presidential campaign rally: each story is both grittily believable and dramatically suggestive, and they all add up to a satiric, yet expansive vision of that corner of the country.

The Great New Wonderful, with its unfinished title that seems to ask, "What are we going to make of the world that came into being that day?," never knits up, but four of the strands have the specificity of first-rate naturalistic short story writing and are completely convincing. The capper is the interaction between Sandie and the grief counselor, which is daringly deadpan bizarre vaudeville unlike anything else I've seen in response to September 11th.

The Avi-Satish story is the least keyed-up, but enjoyable because of Shah's undyingly chipper readings. Avi is an optimist and a constant talker, as if he were a life coach to himself and his friend. Satish has become taciturn, but this only causes Avi to point out how good things are. He's so glad to be alive, however, he loses track of some things that matter – fidelity to his wife, for instance. (Just because the woman at the grocery store's ass is perfection doesn't mean he has to sample it.) Dramatically, this episode is the least compelling but it's fully realized in its modest terms.