Directed by Carl Bessai. Starring Ian McKellen and Deborah Kara Unger. Rated PG

In Wild Strawberries, Ingmar Bergman's valedictorian effort (but made when the Swedish director was not quite 40), the elderly protagonist revisits his missed opportunities, adding up to It Could Have Been a Wonderful Life, Scandinavian division.

Emile's aging lead, a retired scholar solidly played by Ian McKellen during a low-key break from his Gandalfian and Magnetic duties, is instead making a tentative return to his Canadian roots. He's travelling to the University of Victoria to receive honours but he's actually making peace of a sort with his late brother's bitter offspring, Nadia (Deborah Kara Unger, vigorously exercising the smoking-mandatory clause in her contract). The results are unsettling for Emile, if sadly soporific for the audience.

Nadia's young daughter (Theo Crane) bears a disturbing resemblance to her mother at a similar age--a fact that gains importance as we gradually learn the unhappy tale of Nadia and her own father, left in Canada when the bookish Emile hightailed it to England. And to put it mildly, it is difficult to buy Tygh Runyan as a twangy Saskatchewan farm boy morphing into McKellen's plummy Oxford don, a transition made doubly baffling by the director's decision to have the 62-year-old actor play himself, but only in some scenes, as a much younger man.

The film's hopscotching momentum is further hobbled by its plethora of flashbacks--particularly those involving Nadia's childhood--used to depict scenes already adequately described by the actors. Furthermore, they unfold in a "gotcha"-like fashion that presupposes we are viewing the film as a titillating mystery as opposed to a psychological character study.

On the strength of his work so far, the okay Johnny and the laughable Lola, Vancouver writer-director Carl Bessai appears to have neither a solid grasp of his material as entertainment nor sufficient trust that an audience will understand the depth of his pleas to be taken seriously--so he just gets more insistent.

Bessai's Bergmanesque aspirations would be admirable if they weren't undercut by the naked visibility of his striving in virtually every frame. No wonder his stories turn out mood-managed to a punishing degree. (This is reflected here in Vincent Mai's minimalistic score, which, although finely wrought in its own right, keeps underlining the beautiful tragedy of it all lest we miss the profundity.)

As a group, these movies miss the crackle of life and the risk reflected in everyday accidents, happy and otherwise. As such, they succeed neither as art nor commerce. That the filmmaker's third effort turned out as polished as a statue in the kitsch museum suggests not accomplishment, exactly, but a further retreat into a sealed world where humour and vitality cannot intrude.

We don't normally do this, but if the Straight were to give advice to boxed-in filmmakers, adapting a proven work of literature--written by someone else, of course--would be worth a good hard think at this juncture.