Arlen Faber (Jeff Daniels) wrote a spiritual book a long time ago
called Me and God. The book changed many lives, because people,
apparently, have a lot of questions for God, and Arlen, apparently,
answered them. And because, apparently, everyone in America is a
complete fucking moron, they believed that he answered them by
actually asking God to God’s great big face. (Seriously, this is
the conflict at the climax of this movie—he has to confess to
disappointed fans that he and God are not tight bros.) Now Arlen is
haunted by his early success, and becomes a half-hearted recluse (he
still totally goes out and does stuff, he’s just mildly irritated about
it), and can’t write anymore, and develops many insincere quirks
involving action figures and not touching his dead dad’s piano. But
when he meets a wacky chiropractor (she eats soy bacon and egg whites!)
and a greasy young recovering alcoholic (Step Four: Wash Your Hair,
Man), Arlen is forced to loosen up, learn from the wisdom of children,
make out with Lauren Graham, and be a human again. STOP ME IF YOU’VE
HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE.
I remember once in college, a friend of mine gave me an impassioned
speech about the problem with movies that are about books. Like, when a
character in a movie (e.g., Arlen Faber) is famous for having written
Earth’s Most Ecstatically Brilliant and World-Changing Combination of
Words Ever Committed to Paper, but we can’t know anything about the
book specifically because the filmmakers have neither the time nor the
talent to write such a book. The movie can never follow through. It
just expects us to believe, on good faith, that this dude wrote the
best book ever and to rest all of our sympathies and expectations for
the plot of the movie on that completely baseless promise. Then my
college friend made me watch Wonder Boys (literally infinitely
superior to The Answer Man), which neatly solves the dilemma by
revealing, in the end, that the film’s narration was dude’s next book
all along, and since Michael Chabon (an actual writer) wrote it, it’s
actually kind of believable as a good book. To contrast, here is a
sample line from The Answer Man: “I’ve seen hell, and its name
is Reno, Nevada.” 
I was surprised that some people really enjoyed this when it played at SIFF. It had one or two charming moments I suppose (and I’m not even counting Olivia Thirlby), but overall just went nowhere.
Actually, the thing that annoyed me the most was that towards the end of the movie you see some protesters that lead you to believe some side story was chopped out. The chopping of a story during editing fine, but letting the remnants blatantly stay in some of the shots is just sloppy. Or maybe they had a purpose there that I missed.
Er, that should read “during editing is fine”.
If hell is Reno, I guess that makes Fort Lauderdale heaven and Minneapolis a kind of Nirvana or Purgatory. The afterlife is officially comprised of mediocre American cities.