Directed by Richard Attenborough. Starring Shirley MacLaine, Christopher Plummer, and Mischa Barton. Rated PG.

There are some intriguing elements in Closing the Ring, which transparently aspires to The Notebook’s quiet popularity but doesn’t even manage to climb to that low-set bar.

In this tale set in 1991 Michigan, Shirley MacLaine is strong as Ethel Ann, a hard-boozing widow not noticeably grieving for her newly deceased husband, much to the whining dismay of a daughter played by Neve Campbell at her least likable. It gradually becomes apparent that Mommie Drinkest is still pining, after a half-century, for a U.S. flyboy who didn’t survive the Second World War and that the pal she married always ran second-best.

Working from an undistinguished script by Peter Woodward, veteran director Richard Attenborough clues us in through a lurching series of flashbacks. These mostly happen in one small town near a Midwest air base, with Torontonians David Alpay and Gregory Smith making some impression as gung-ho officers commissioned after Pearl Harbor. (Smith later turns into Christopher Plummer.)

Pretty Brit-born Mischa Barton is okay, despite accent problems, playing the young Ethel Ann. But as her romantic counterpoint, Stephen Amell must have been chosen for his golden good looks, because the guy can’t deliver a convincing line to save his life—perhaps one reason he doesn’t return from his station near Belfast, where another, more interesting strand of the story is pulled. Young Martin McCann is delightful as a lad digging up wartime artifacts with an old-timer (Pete Postlethwaite) who remembers how they got there.

Attenborough seems to be drawing parallels between the dumb luck of loss during the Second World War and the later flaring conflict in Northern Ireland, but viewers will require a lot more than bland sentiment and routine melodrama to figure out what it all means.