After turning heads by forking over a hefty $6 million for the low-budget Next Stop Wonderland at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Miramax chairman Harvey Weinstein announced that he wasn't just buying a romantic comedy; he was getting into "the Brad Anderson business," signing the writer-director to helm two future projects. Unfortunately, it looks as if he's invested in the wrong business. What's good about Next Stop Wonderland—and nearly good enough to warrant recommendation—has nothing to do with Anderson's sloppy, disjointed filmmaking, and everything to do with Hope Davis' far more disciplined and appealing lead performance. As a single woman wearily staring down a parade of suitors, Davis (The Daytrippers) has enough faith in her charisma to be mopey and unlikable on occasion, which does a lot to ground the film's runaway quirkiness. Like this year's similar (and less tolerable) tale of coincidence and romantic destiny, Sliding Doors, it runs on two parallel tracks: Davis has just split with her longtime boyfriend, played by the scene-stealing Philip Seymour Hoffman (Boogie Nights, The Big Lebowski), and isn't anxious to get into another relationship. Alan Gelfant, her would-be soulmate, is a volunteer diver at a Boston aquarium studying to be a marine biologist. To say that Anderson takes a wayward narrative path in bringing them together would be an enormous understatement: Was he really that committed to a gangster subplot about the abduction of a pufferfish? Nevertheless, Next Stop Wonderland casts such a sweet afterglow, thanks to Davis' star-making turn and a Brazilian bossa nova soundtrack, that it almost succeeds anyway.