May 24, 2002 | By turns harsh and humorous, allusive and specific, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing views a group of tenuously interconnected New Yorkers with all the detached curiosity that scientists usually bring to observing lab specimens.

The movie is too chilly around the heart to be totally involving, and too obviously schematic to offer much in the way of surprises. Even so, at least one of its four separate storylines is richly satisfying in its Chekhovian melancholy irony, and all four feature well-cast actors who add welcome touches of human warmth to the proceedings.

The One Thing on everybody's mind is fate -- or, if you prefer, chance -- though luck also figures into the equations and equivocating. In the opening scene, Gene (Alan Arkin), a chronically glum insurance claims adjustor, talks about the mixed blessing of seemingly good fortune with a stranger he meets in a bar. But Troy (Matthew McConaughey), the other bar patron, quickly dismisses the whole concept of "luck" as "a lazy man's excuse." Troy is a rising young prosecutor who's celebrating a recent courtroom victory, and he's too full of himself not to believe that he's the master of his own destiny.

A bit later, however, Troy takes a nasty detour from the fast lane. On his way home, he accidentally hits a young woman who suddenly appears in front of his car. He panics and drives away. Then things really start to go downhill for him.

Director Jill Sprecher -- who co-wrote the screenplay with her sister, Karen Sprecher -- periodically returns to chart the stages of Troy's fall from grace. But she's every bit as interested in the three other storylines, which unfold in teasingly nonlinear fashion.

We discover that Beatrice (Clea DuVall), the hit-and-run victim, is a free-spirited dreamer who works as a housecleaner, and thinks the best of everyone. Even being struck by a car isn't enough to diminish her sunny-side-up optimism. (After all, she figures, she wasn't killed.) But then something else happens.

Troy makes a cameo appearance in another storyline when he tries to sell his car to Walker (John Turturro), a college physics professor who's desperate to break free from the predictable routine of his mundane existence. Trouble is, neither a new car nor an affair with a married colleague is sufficiently liberating. Eventually, Walker longs for his old life with his estranged wife (Amy Irving). But as he pointedly notes in a classroom lecture on entropy, "You can never go back to the way it was."

Gene learns the same lesson in a similarly hard way as the central figure in the movie's fourth and best storyline. Defeated by a life of disappointment and drudgery -- he's stuck in a dull job, his wife has divorced him, his adult son is a drug-addicted thief -- Gene is unreasonably affronted by the relentless cheeriness of an adjustor under his authority. And so, using downsizing as an excuse, he fires the guy. What happens next doesn't exactly qualify as a tale of redemption, but it's as close to that as Sprecher is willing to allow in the bleak landscape of Thirteen Conversations About One Thing.