Karen Allen (Dana Starbard/YEAR BY THE SEA © 2016)

Hollywood provides so few meaty leading roles for older women that the prospect of a new film starring Karen Allen is enticing, especially for fans of Raiders of The Lost Ark and Starman. Unfortunately, despite a talented cast and good intentions, Year By The Sea is an underwhelming drama.

Allen stars as Joan Wilcox, a struggling writer at a crossroads. When one of Joan’s adult sons gets married and her husband Robin (Michael Cristofer), without her permission, sells their upstate New York home move to Wichita, Kansas, she packs up for Cape Cod to spend a “year by the sea” to find herself. Along the way, she makes new friends, tries out new experiences, and finds inspiration for her next book, which, of course, turns out to the be basis for the very film we’ve been watching. In cynical studio exec speak, it’s Eat, Pray, Love for the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel set.

On paper, that’s not a bad idea for a movie. More and more mainstream releases are aimed at the same demographic, peddling reheated genre exercises and big budget spectacles to the young. But there are plenty of viewers who still want to head to the multiplex for stories about regular adults wrestling with relatable problems. Year By The Sea is a pleasant change of pace for an industry that seems to believe that women over a certain age are little more than grandparents whose tragic death would be a great way to inform a younger protagonist’s character arc.

Unfortunately, this movie just isn’t very good.

As entertainment, it’s not without merit. Karen Allen still possesses the same magnetism that made her one of the most underrated leading women of the 1980s, and supporting players such as Celia Imrie (a Best Exotic Marigold regular, natch) bring their own brand of charisma.

But the film is painfully underwritten. With no real plot, hackneyed scenes just unfold one after the other with no dramatic escalation to keep the viewer interested beyond liking Joan and wanting to see her find happiness. Even the film’s ace in the hole, the subtle May-December flirtation between Joan and fisherman Cahoon (Yanick Bisson), is largely lifeless.

It isn’t that Allen and Bisson don’t have chemistry (they do) or that their connection lacks believability (it doesn’t), but the script gives them little dialogue to express that compatibility. And first time writer-director Alexander Janko, who’s worked mainly on film music, doesn’t have the gift for setting up knowing glances and pregnant silences to mask his deficits as a scribe.

Janko’s attempt to translate the inner conflicts of a memoir into the visual language of film more closely resembles a feature length commercial for Cialis than it does a genuine piece of cinema. Despite comforting scenery and likeable characters, human interactions are barely more captivating than closeups of watching paint dry.

The world needs more films for older audiences, so such viewers can see themselves on screen and so the seasoned veterans that get these roles can continue to get work long after their superhero movie days are gone. Sadly, even if it is really nice to see Karen Allen on screen again, she deserves much better than Year by the Sea.

Year By The Sea
Written & Directed by Alexander Janko (Based on the book by Joan Anderson)
Starring Karen Allen, S. Epatha Merkerson, Michael Cristofer, Jane Hajduk and Yanick Bisson
Unrated
115 Minutes
Opens today at Landmark’s West End Cinema