Buffalo Rising Online

The center of the film is the Brooklyn Cigar Co., at the corner of Third Street and Eighth Avenue. For Auggie Wren, who owns it, the store is the center of the world - so much so that every single morning, he stands across the street from it and takes a photograph.

Paul, too, has had his life changed. One day after buying his Te Amos at the store, he is walking absentmindedly down the street when he almost steps into the path of a truck. He is pulled back and saved by a young black man named Rashid (Harold Perrineau Jr.). Paul insists he do something for Rashid; it's a universal rule that when someone saves your life, you repay him. Rashid resists, but finally settles for a lemonade.

What with one thing and another, Rashid eventually ends up living in Paul's apartment for a few days, to the indignation of Rashid's aunt, who doesn't understand the situation.

Life goes on. Auggie's girlfriend from years ago (Stockard Channing) materializes with the news that Felicity (Ashley Judd), who may be his daughter, is pregnant. Rashid, who speaks in careful, intellectual terms, turns out to be another lost child: After his mother's death years ago, his father disappeared. Then Rashid (whose real name turns out to be Thomas Jefferson Cole) tracks his father (Forest Whitaker) down to a small-town gas station, where . . .

Well, where yet another coincidence reveals that life does not unfold by plan, but by chance, often assisted by coincidence, irony and luck - both good and bad. There are 8 million stories in the city, and "Smoke" wants to tell about eight of them. The result sometimes feels contrived, as if the next revelation is being hauled in by its heels, but the writer, Paul Auster, and the director, Wayne Wang, find such a sweetness in the material and such grace in the actors that the movie weaves a spell.

I wonder if I have seen any other actor in more movies in the last five years than Harvey Keitel. He works all the time, in big roles and small, and throughout his career, he has always made himself available for projects that are risky or experimental or just plain goofy. Here he is as the cigar store philosopher. Look back at his recent films, and he is the vile "Bad Lieutenant," a Mr. Fixit in "Pulp Fiction," the outcast neighbor in "The Piano," a crook in "Reservoir Dogs" and a con man who is a loving father in "Imaginary Crimes" - and in the upcoming "Ulysses' Gaze," the Jury Prize winner at Cannes this year, he is an exiled Greek filmmaker.

He has such an immutable face and body and voice that you'd think he'd play the same role over and over, but he never does. In "Smoke," he is the spirit that holds everything together: not only the actors, but the audience, listening to the stories of the others and wondering how it all fits in.