‘Passion Fish’ (R)

This may be the only time you see "filmmaker John Sayles" and "gracefulness" in the same sentence. Ploddingly impressed with his ideas, the erstwhile fiction writer usually goes to ponderous, almost anti-visual lengths to realize them. At his best, he achieves a thoughtful, unconventional style. At his worst, he's dull and self-indulgent.

Luckily, his new movie "Passion Fish" shows Sayles at his best. A New York critic noted that this is a movie for people who hate Sayles movies. There is something different -- dare I say graceful? -- about it. It's more fun and less pedantic. A two-character drama set in Louisiana's swamp country, it sloshes around appropriately in self-pity, as principals Mary McDonnell and Alfre Woodard nurse their psychological wounds.

This is Sayles's kind of wallowing and, with McDonnell and Woodard at their best, the movie has an easygoing charm. It's a series of languid, eccentric pleasures.

Soap actress McDonnell lies helpless and paralyzed from the waist down in a hospital gurney. As we learn later, she stepped out of a New York taxi to be sideswiped by another cab. (Ironically, she was bound for a leg waxing.) The movie shorthandedly charts her angry resistance through physical therapy sessions, then her exiled ensconcement in her late parents' Louisiana home.

Crippled and curmudgeonly, she alienates every uniformed archetype (fascist, incurable weeper, etc.) that tries to nurse her. When tight-lipped, no-nonsense Woodard takes the job, McDonnell meets her match. It doesn't take repeated viewings of "Driving Miss Daisy" to anticipate this master-servant friendship evolving into a sisterly friendship. But there's more to this than "Daisy Revisited." Sayles brings into play all levels of the women's mercurial relationship. McDonnell and Woodard don't just differ racially, economically and socially. They're on uncertain terms with their own roles. McDonnell paid good money to purge her Louisiana accent. The locals whom she last saw as a teen seem from another planet. And now she watches her television character -- an amnesiac called Scarlett -- with more than ironic detachment.

As for Woodard, a city girl from Chicago, she treads everywhere with appalled trepidation. There seems to be a constant look of vague horror at everything required of her, from cleaning to cooking. "You are a nurse, aren't you?" asks McDonnell, upon meeting her.

While the two women get to know each other and themselves, a string of minor characters come and go, from McDonnell's dandyish, "literary" uncle to a scowling man from Woodard's veiled past. Two obvious suitors-to-be present themselves soon enough for both women. David Strathairn, an old backwater crush of McDonnell's, seems to have eyes for her. But he's strapped with five kids and a wife who found religion between the second and third child.

For Woodard, there's Vondie Curtis-Hall, who plays the movie's most engaging character, a guitar-strumming, woman-lovin' cowboy called Sugar LeDoux, a k a Ulysse. "You probably live in a swamp, right?" Woodard tells him. "Dead raccoons and {expletive} hangin' round your house?"

Sayles employs a lighthearted indolence that gives things a distant, deeper texture. The story progresses at its own pace. As the women open up spiritually, we get out into the outdoors more, culminating in a life-affirming trip through snake-infested bayou waters, courtesy of boatman Strathairn.

By then, you may feel you've learned more about these women than you need to. A few too many ghosts from Woodard's past have already shown up at the doorstep. And the women's inevitable friendship is already an old story. But if you're in a drifting frame of mind, you may go along with the meandering, long after the movie has essentially run its course.