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In the past few years, the suburbs have reemerged as the favorite whipping boy of the hipoisie, from the adolescent temper tantrum of "Happiness" to the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing contempt of the sterile objet d'art "American Beauty." These movies revel in two clichés to which movie critics are particularly susceptible: the cliché of suburbs as stultifying traps of conformity, allowing critics the luxury of feeling superior to the people on-screen, and the cliché that a pessimistic film is inherently truer and more daring than one that admits even a flicker of hope, allowing critics to paint themselves as able to face the hard, dirty truth.

Judy Berlin Written and directed by Eric Mendelsohn Starring Edie Falco, Barbara Barrie, Bob Dishy, Madeline Kahn and Aaron Harnick

Filmmakers and novelists have tended to treat the physical surface of the suburbs -- the houses that look the same, the well-tended lawns and gardens, the post offices and schools and churches and supermarkets -- as if they were indistinguishable from the emotional lives of the people who live there. And when they've allowed that the inner life of suburbanites might not be as placid or cheerful as their surroundings, they've often used inner turmoil as evidence to show that suburban life is based on a lie. (Presumably, urban neurotics are more honest for choosing a locale that approximates the chaotic uncertainty in their heads.)

Mendelsohn doesn't so much reject that view as consider it beneath any filmmaker who aspires to maturity. One of his characters is David Gold (Aaron Harnick), a failed young filmmaker who has retreated from Los Angeles to his parents' home in Babylon, Long Island. "I always wanted to make a documentary about this town, but not sarcastic," the director has him say at one point. (Babylon also happens to be the hometown of Mendelsohn.) "Judy Berlin" is the fulfillment of David's wish.

The details of the suburban life Mendelsohn shows us -- the split-level houses with wall-to-wall carpeting and wrought-iron railings leading from one floor to the next, a lighted cabinet of porcelain figurines -- may not be to his liking, but neither are they his excuse to condemn the bad taste of his characters. Mendelsohn grew up in living rooms and kitchens and bedrooms and schoolrooms like these, and he treats them with affectionate, if not nostalgic, recognition. Middle-class prosperity hasn't saved the characters in "Judy Berlin" from unhappiness or doubt, but it hasn't turned them into the insensate cartoon monsters depicted by Todd Solondz and Sam Mendes. They carry on with their jobs and lives, but they can't help suspecting life holds only more of the deadeningly familiar.

The exception is the title character (Edie Falco, of "The Sopranos"), who leaves home at 32 to make it as an actress in L.A., the same trip David has returned from, broken. In the hours before she heads out, Judy runs into David, whom she had a crush on in high school. Wearing braces that become visible whenever a smile creases her face (which is frequently), Falco plays Judy with hearty guilelessness. Her undiminished enthusiasm makes for a sweetly comic mismatch with David's tail-between-his-legs recessiveness. Judy hasn't a clue what awaits her in L.A., and yet David can't help responding to her, can't help shrugging off the mantle of depressive putz that he carries around with him like a 50-pound weight. (Aaron Harnick takes David from initially unlikable to very touching.) Judy and David's encounter is only one of the stories Mendelsohn is telling in this ensemble piece, but it's a kind of paradigm for the other ones, a quiet confrontation between expectation and disappointment, and a realization that it's possible to live between the two.

"Judy Berlin" takes place over the course of a prematurely cold fall afternoon, during a solar eclipse that goes on for hours and casts a sort of spell over the town. The meaning of the eclipse remains -- wisely, on Mendelsohn's part -- elusive. But it's as if this gentle and unsettling reordering of the natural world in which day becomes night frees people to face what's in their hearts and to see what's in front of them. Throughout the movie, people appear on their front lawns, looking at the streets and trees and houses as if they've never taken them in before. The fine-hued gradation of light and shadow in Jeffrey Seckendorf's black-and-white photography gives the setting the muffled, quizzical impact of seeing something familiar for the first time.

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