WhatzUp

13 Conversations About One Thing
by Derek Neff

It doesn’t really matter, of course, but I wish I had seen the late-2002 release of Jill Sprecher’s 13 Conversations About One Thing before I had already compiled my list of last year’s best movies a couple of weeks back; if I had, I would surely have found some way to squeeze this onto the list.

13 Conversations masterfully takes us into the lives of several people whose fates are connected in ways that not even they realize. There’s a righteous young D.A. (Matthew McConaughey) whose own ideas about justice are called into question when, one night, he hits a young woman with his car and then leaves the scene of the accident; there’s a quietly miserable insurance adjuster (Alan Arkin) whose obsession with one of his happy-go-lucky underlings grows to the point of distraction; there’s a rigid mathematics professor (John Turturro) who separates from his wife (Amy Irving) in order to carry on with an affair with a colleague; there’s an optimistic young woman (Clea DuVall) who cleans other people’s ritzy apartments for a living, and whose outlook on life is forever changed after a tragic accident ...

13 Conversations is never less than utterly compelling to watch, and the themes it explores — how possible is it to be truly happy? what is coincidence, and what is fate? how do we make sense out of our lives when the world can be such a cold, cold place? — are never heavy-handed but always arise naturally from the stories and the characters.

It’s truly a shame that 13 Conversations hasn’t garnered more attention than it has;. Perhaps that will change now that Arkin has received a well-deserved best acting nomination for the upcoming Golden Globes.