If Magnolia's Paul Thomas Anderson made a romantic comedy, it'd probably be more than a little like Happy Accidents, an unconventional film that's pretty tough to pigeonhole into a specific genre.  It's nothing like the sappy, crappy rom-coms we're used to seeing (read: chick-flicks like Serendipity), and as a reward for daring to be a little bit different, Accidents has been banished to a very limited independent release, despite featuring two popular leads (one is an Oscar winner and the other is a star on television's biggest franchise).

Marisa Tomei (Someone Like You) plays Ruby Weaver, a single New Yorker who has had such a long history of landing in relationships with "fixer-uppers" that her shrink (Holland Taylor, Legally Blonde) makes her stare into the mirror and repeat "I am willing to find a balance between my own needs and my concern for others" like a mantra.  In other words, Ruby has some serious co-dependency issues (it's almost like Tomei is playing a grown-up version of her character from Untamed Heart).  Luckily, she has a supportive network of friends who collect photos of their former lovers in a box called "The Ex File."

On the day she's fired from her job as a 411 operator, Ruby meets and falls for the extremely charming but very odd Sam Deed (Vincent D'Onofrio, The Cell), a hospital orderly from Dubuque, Iowa...circa 2470.  That's right, kids – Ruby finally meets her Mr. Right and he says he's a time-traveler who fell in love with a photograph of her found almost 500 years in the future.  After taking advice from her shrink and her mom (Tovah Feldshuh), Ruby decides to just humor him because the rest of the relationship is that great.  So the whole man-from-the-future thing becomes somewhat of a role-playing game...until Ruby slowly starts to believe he might be for real.

Accidents may sound like a K-Pax rip-off to some folks, but keep in mind that this film was shot in 1999 and its release was delayed because it couldn't get a distribution deal.  In fact, writer/director/editor Brad Anderson's next film (the David Caruso horror flick Session 9, which, surprisingly, has nothing to do with his career) actually beat Accidents to theatres by two weeks. Accidents might even remind others of hastily produced fish-out-of-water movies about people going either forward or backward in time (like Black Knight or the upcoming Kate and Leopold), but it's got more originality in its pinky than most of these other films could ever dream of having.

Anderson burst onto the film scene a few years back with Next Stop Wonderland, which was one of those pictures scooped up for an ungodly sum of money in the independent film boom of 1996-1998 (Anyone remember the Sundance feeding frenzy over The Spitfire Grill?  Anyone remember The Spitfire Grill?  Hello?).  Wonderland didn't exactly set the world on fire either critically (although everyone loved Hope Davis, which remains a mystery) or at the box office, where it made about half of what Miramax foolishly shelled out for it.  It isn't until now that Anderson displays the flair people expected to see in Wonderland.

Accidents is far from perfect.  It starts out very slowly and picks up speed as it approaches its fantastic conclusion.  D'Onofrio is, as always, a joy to watch, and Tomei comes off slightly less desperate than we're used to seeing her, although she's still mighty whiny.  And there's a hysterical cameo from Anthony Michael Hall that might remind some people of the theatre lobby scene of Annie Hall.

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