Small-screen actor Zach Braff, who also wrote and directed, as the most impassive sadsack this side of Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate: impassive amid the surrounding panic of a plane-crash dream scene; impassive in the sanatorium ambience of his bedroom, lying motionless on his back and listening to the news of his mother's death in a phone message from his father; impassive in the face of abuse from customers in his moonlighting job as a waiter at a Vietnamese restaurant. (Hard to picture him being as impassive in his other job: actor.) There turns out to be a medical, a medicinal, reason for his impassivity, but no such internal rationale arises for the nonstop assaults on the hero's, or the viewer's, sensitivities: the excessive vibrato of a Jewish funeral singer in a graveside rendition of "Once, Twice, Three Times a Lady," the knight-in-armor at the breakfast table, the guide dog who humps the hero's leg in the doctor's waiting room, the backyard pet cemetery. It goes on and on like that, an endless parade of embarrassments and bizarreries. The real, the external reason for this onslaught of oddities, photographed with a Diane Arbus-like bluntness, might be sought in the filmmaker's commonplace desire to be Wes Anderson. Another way to say the same thing, in broader terms, would be the filmmaker's dread of being dull and ordinary, notwithstanding his ostensible concern for ordinary people in a dull New Jersey suburb. The anticipation of the next little kink, the next little quirk, takes the place of story interest or character interest, a poor inducement to stay in your seat. Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Ian Holm. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd