Wonderful World Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.0

Wonderful World Blu-ray Movie Review

Read on to find out what is and isn’t so wonderful about it.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater March 14, 2010

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?

Black vs. White. Obviously, I mean the chess game.

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 clichés 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 naïve—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.

Wonderful World Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Wonderful World looks true to its low-budget origins on Blu-ray, though the film's 1080p/AVC-encoded image does appear somewhat older than you'd expect from a 2009 production. Not quite sharp, but not totally soft, the print has a lived in look that's a bit messy at times, with small black specks of debris coming and going throughout the film. There are a few moments of expressive clarity—see the threading of Ibou's sweater, for instance—but even in the tightest close- ups, truly fine detail seems to be lacking. Colors are strictly realistic, with a predominance of browns, beiges, and other neutral tones, and while the image lacks intensity—contrast could be a hair tighter—this seems to be the result of intentional and/or budgetary restrictions. Black levels seem slightly hazy at times, and if you look closely you'll notice that this is due to blue flecks of chroma noise hovering over the darker parts of the image. That said, the film's grain structure is warm and intact, and doesn't ever vary distractingly between scenes. Likewise, there are no overt technical anomalies. Wonderful World certainly isn't a stunner in 1080p, but minus the dirt on the print here, this is probably the best the film is going to look.

Wonderful World Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As expected from a low-key indie drama/romance/comedy (dram-rom-com?), Wonderful World's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track is laid-back and unpresumptuous. The mix is decidedly front-heavy. While for long stretches of the film my surround speakers were as mute as the ancient statues on Easter Island, some quiet but appreciable ambience does leak out from time to time, like the chatter in the comedy club or the thunder and rain at the end of the film. The music also bleeds into the rears, the pounding Senegalese drums sounding best, and the more western music sounding, well, kind of dippy. The picked and strummed strings of Ben's guitar have definite presence, with a tone that's both full and bright. Ibou's Wolof accent can get a bit thick at times, making his faster-spoken lines a little difficult to make out, but otherwise the dialogue is nicely balanced in the mix and easy to understand.

Wonderful World Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

As Soon as Fish Fall Out of the Sky: Character and Story of Wonderful World (SD, 4:32)
In this brief segment, Matthew Broderick, Michael Kenneth Williams, Phillip Baker Hall, and Sanaa Lathan discuss their characters and the general arc of the plot.

Behind the Scenes: Working with Writer/Director Josh Goldin and Actor Matthew Broderick (SD, 1:30)
The other actors dole out a few pleasantries about working with Goldin and Broderick.

Behind the Scenes Montage (SD, 1:28)
Exactly what it sounds like: a montage of on-set b-roll footage.

HDNet: A Look at Wonderful World (1080i, 4:41)
A standard HDNet promo, featuring writer/director Josh Goldin, who explains the origins of the project, and Matthew Broderick, who gives a brief plot synopsis.

Also from Magnolia Home Entertainment Blu-ray (1080p, 6:19)
Includes trailers for Red Cliff, District 13: Ultimatum, and The Warlords, as well as a promo for HDNet.

Wonderful World Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Wonderful World means well, and that definitely counts for something, but the film's execution never quite matches its ambitions. It may be worth a purchase for Matthew Broderick's most ardent followers, but for everyone else I'd suggest a rental at most.