In Theaters: The Answer Man

The City of Brotherly Love is glutted with fathers, sons, and the holy ghost in The Answer Man, writer-director John Hindman's debut film. The specter of some of the most tiresome traits of Amerindie cinema also looms over the story of Arlen Faber (Jeff Daniels), a reclusive writer made whole again through the healing connection to single-mom chiropractor Elizabeth (Lauren Graham) and 12-stepping used-bookstore manager Kris (Lou Taylor Pucci).

Arlen, whose book Me and God is still on the best-seller list 20 years after its initial publication, is a cuss-prone, toy-monster-collecting misanthrope whose bad back leads him, crawling on all fours, to Elizabeth's office. "You might not be cured, but you're going to feel a lot better, I promise," she says as she aligns the crank's vertebrae, tidily summing up Hindman's platitudinous script. A tentative courtship begins over dinner, with Arlen assuring Elizabeth -- wondering whether she's doing enough with her life -- that she is God's muse. The dyad soon becomes a trio of broken souls, as Kris, in and out of AA meetings and the squalid apartment he shares with his pickled pop, shows up on the doorstep of Arlen's townhouse for metaphysical guidance.

If God is in the details, Hindman doesn't really care: We learn little about the book that made Arlen a spiritual guide to millions for two decades, only that it, like all self-help treatises, is worthy of our scorn -- an especially hypocritical stance in a movie cluttered with indie-film bromides and easy soul-salving. Fortunately, Daniels and Graham, in roles similar but inferior to earlier, indelible characters they've played (Daniels as a self-obsessed novelist in The Squid and the Whale; Graham's complex solo parent in The Gilmore Girls), rise above the material, bringing nuance to their innumerable moments of emotional woundedness. Though Olivia Thirlby and Kat Dennings appear in wasted minor roles in a seemingly desperate attempt to shoehorn in Gen Y stars, The Answer Man does at least offer the pleasure of seeing two gifted adult actors onscreen, even if what comes out of their mouths is never more sophisticated than the lyrics to Joan Osborne's "One of Us."