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Ed Solomon's directorial debut—Levity—offers little of just that. This might surprise moviegoers eager for the latest from the writer of Men in Black. Fittingly, the title refers to what's missing from the lives of its burdened characters.

Solomon is a moviemaker with a lot on his mind, including forgiveness, faith, friendship, and the way we run from self-realization and dodge the consequences for our sins. These themes needed richer soil than his previous scripts for Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Charlie's Angels.

At 42, Solomon has at last found a home for these ideas. "I see a lot of my friends [in the entertainment industry] say, 'I've worked hard enough, so I'm going to cash in and do what comes easier,'" Solomon says. "I feel the opposite. I'm getting older, and in order to keep growing, I'm going to push myself."

The seeds for Levity were planted in Solomon's college days when he worked as a tutor for teenage prisoners. "I met this kid who had killed somebody," Solomon says. "He had been tried as an adult and sentenced to life in prison. He kept a photograph of the person he killed. The judge had told him to keep it and to hold the boy's things. I remember him saying, 'I had to hold his football.' That really haunted me."

Levity's plot grew from more than this encounter. It has roots in his own spiritual "grappling." Here's the premise:

An ex-con named Manual Jordan (Billy Bob Thornton) returns to society still haunted by his crimes. Staring out at the world like a friendly ghost, furrowed brow framed by long silver hair, he experiments with covert acts of kindness. His first subjects are the sister of the man he murdered, Adele (Holly Hunter), and her son. But things get complicated. A ringing telephone plunges him into the mysterious "ministry" of an agitated preacher called Miles Evans (Morgan Freeman).

Evans hires Manual to help him reach stubborn street youth. There, Manual develops a reluctant, fatherly affection for a beautiful wreck named Sofia (Spiderman's Kirsten Dunst). These promising relationships help Manual gain trust, influence, and confidence, but all of that is threatened when he becomes embroiled in a local conflict that tests his moral courage.

It's hard to believe this stuff is from the same pen that inked the scripts for the Bill and Ted comedies and Men in Black. Levity becomes the most soul-searching entry in Hollywood's recent streak of high-visibility parables. Like last year's Changing Lanes, it boils the anxieties of complex characters down to essential questions. Its heavily populated world of ethically challenged wanderers resembles the critically acclaimed Thirteen Conversations About One Thing. But it reminds me even more of Lawrence Kasdan's 1991 drama, Grand Canyon, as its broken heroes collide in misunderstanding and mutual need.

Cinematographer Roger Deakins (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) gives Solomon's storytelling a striking interplay of shadow and chilly light. He finds drama in the silhouettes of city buildings against a night sky, in the cold solitude of a cell or a basement apartment, accentuating each character's spiritual emptiness. Blessed by Deakins's clear vision, the actors slip into their characters easily. While Thornton gives us the film's compelling center, Morgan Freeman nearly steals the show by relishing his role as the sandpaper-voiced Evans, a preacher more guilt-ridden than any since Robert Duvall's in The Apostle.

While the film focuses heavily on questions of the soul, Solomon sidesteps overtly religious dialogue. Manual's meditations on redemption entertain only those options that are humanly possible. He insists that he does not "deserve forgiveness." The possibility that forgiveness might be offered freely never occurs to him. So he wanders heavy-hearted from encounter to encounter, refusing to call upon the God he keeps talking about.

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April (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47