Beginning with its ending and cobbled together via out-of-order celluloid chunks in the vein of Pulp Fiction, Jill Sprecher's 13 Conversations About One Thing is as brilliant a second film as you're likely to see.  As the title suggests, it is broken down into 13 vignettes which involve Sprecher's four main characters.  The "thing" the conversations are about is faith, whether in religion, the law, daily routine or just bad luck.  Like Magnolia, its characters repeatedly find themselves victims of ironic fate and happenstance as they flip-flop between the extremes of pessimism and optimism.

Set in a seemingly deserted New York City and separated by intertitles like "Show me a happy man," "Ignorance is bliss," and "Fuck guilt," Conversations begins with the threads of its two most interesting stories.  Troy (Matthew McConaughey, The Wedding Planner) is a young turk lawyer with the District Attorney's Office who has just managed to send an innocent man to prison.  While he celebrates at a local bar, he notices Gene (Alan Arkin, America's Sweethearts), a dejected-looking patron he innocently and half-drunkenly subjects to a barstool rant about the merits of a finely tuned legal system.

Then Troy gets up, hops in his car and runs somebody over in an alley on the way home.  Knowing the legal system can occasionally chew up the random innocent individual (see above), he takes off without a second thought, though the grief eventually catches up with him.  In the meantime, we learn more about Gene, specifically that he's a middle manager at an insurance company whose recent rating drop forces him to lay off one of the office's investigators.  Instead of choosing the most ineffective employee, Gene sacks a happy-go-lucky co-worker, just because he's sick of the man seeing the world through rose-colored glasses.

Other threads involve a physics professor (John Turturro, The Man Who Cried) who leaves both his wife (Amy Irving, Traffic) and the routines he feels have turned him into a slave, only to find a life without both is pretty chaotic; and a devout housecleaner (Clea DuVall, Ghosts of Mars) who is badly injured in an accident and then, as she recovers, is accused of stealing by one of her rich, asshole clients.

The characters intermittently cross paths in unique ways viewers won't initially understand because of Conversations' exceptional structure, which is likely to be the darling of the independent film community much the same way Memento was last year (like that Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award winner, Conversations is set to unspool at Sundance after getting lost in the shuffle at bigger, more commercial festivals in Toronto and Venice).  This kind of cinematic construction could prove to be deadly in other indie projects, but Conversations has a pretty strong pedigree behind the camera, with Traffic Oscar winner Stephen Mirrione and Dick Pope (The Way of the Gun) serving as the film's editor and cinematographer, respectively.

Sprecher, who you may remember as a production coordinator on such religious-themed films as Last Rites and Broken Vows, co-wrote Conversations with her sister Karen.  Like their 1997 debut, Clockwatchers, the duo show a knack for pegging both dialogue and strangely unique situations that don't seem overly quirky or unbelievable.  And any film that returns Arkin to a role as sleeves-rolled-up office worker (a la Glengarry Glenn Ross) is tops in my book.

1:34 -

for language and brief drug use