A World War II veteran’s funeral in 1991 Michigan leads us to unanswered questions, Belfast treasure hunters, the Provisional IRA, a long-dead American airman and a 50-year-old love triangle in this sentimental drama.

Helmed, as if at arm’s length, by Richard Attenborough, UK-Canada co-production Closing the Ring — which screened at TIFF last year and now slips in for theatrical release — switches between fraught family drama and autumn-of-our-lives wistfulness in a manner that isn’t so much moody as indecisive. As old friends with a simmering torch between them, Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer ably prop up this awkward march down memory lane —?as long as they’re not playing embarrassingly, Dudley Moore-dly sloshed.

As the angry and heart-wrenched daughter to MacLaine’s frosty widow, Neve Campbell is called upon to compensate for the film’s overall lack of passion with waterworks that, though impressively convincing, might as well have been imported from a different movie. But the flashback sequences are the real distraction, shot through with cloying, fiddly-diddly Irish bunk, Mischa Barton doing nothing to convince us that she’s playing the same character as MacLaine, and a key love affair that isn’t so much “misty-watercoloured memory” — though that might be what Attenborough was going for —?as “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” 

Closing the Ring shouldn’t be memorable mainly as a movie in which fans of The O.C. got to see Barton with her kit off, but alas....