Boston-based writer-director Brad Anderson has soldiered on with dogged persistence despite the abuse he's suffered since Miramax overpaid for his flavor-of-the-month romantic comedy Next Stop Wonderland. The studio claimed that it bought the film to "get into the Brad Anderson business," but then got out in short order, dropping Anderson from a scheduled remake of Cédric Klapisch's When The Cat's Away. But while the attention paid to Wonderland was unwarranted, Anderson's follow-up, the long-shelved 1999 science-fiction romance Happy Accidents, doesn't deserve to be treated so shabbily. While plagued by some of the slight, too-cute touches that marred the earlier film, which was more or less Hollywood-in-miniature, Happy Accidents sustains a high-concept premise with funny and delightfully eccentric ideas about time travel and life in the distant future. Playing a slight variation on Hope Davis' loveless neurotic from Wonderland, Marisa Tomei invests real feeling in the potentially thankless role of a brittle codependent who throws herself into an unsteady affair. Though an endless series of bad relationships has her on the defensive, Tomei is intrigued by Vincent D'Onofrio, a bizarre character who claims to be from Dubuque, Iowa. After an abbreviated, weeklong courtship, the two move in together, but Tomei's intuition is tested when D'Onofrio confesses to being a "back traveler" from the year 2470. Torn between believing his elaborate stories or casting them aside as delusional fantasies, Tomei temporarily settles for denying the truth and treating them like a quirky role-playing game. D'Onofrio is a strangely internalized and unpredictable actor whose otherworldly presence makes him more convincing as a future being than as a suitable partner. Happy Accidents follows suit, never resonating as a traditional romantic comedy, but Anderson has fun dreaming up half-cracked theories about the future, which seems reconfigured from old Star Trek episodes and cheap science-fiction novels. Happy Accidents doesn't amount to much on any level, but it's refreshing to see the genre explored with ideas instead of special effects, and it's a sign that Anderson may have more on his mind than his previous work would suggest.