MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Long Day Closes’ Artful but Ponderous

British filmmaker Terence Davies is such a meticulous and self-conscious craftsman that his movies don’t seem directed exactly--they seem calibrated. He deals in powerfully emotional subjects drawn from his own life but he slows the energy level down to a crawl.

In his new film, “The Long Day Closes,” set in Liverpool in the years 1955 and 1956, there are long stretches where we just watch the sunlight shift on a carpet, or observe people being slowly enveloped by shadow. Nothing that Davies does is ordinary or artless but his craftsmanship has its suffocating side too. In this movie about the supposedly happy-go-lucky life of an 11-year-old boy, there isn’t much of his happiness on view.

Davies is more temperamentally suited to agony. Maybe that’s why his previous autobiographical film, “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” which dealt with his father’s brutality, seems stronger. At least his jeweled dreariness made more sense in that film. In “The Long Day Closes” (at the Sunset 5 and NuWilshire), we’ve entered a nightworld where everybody is jubilant yet bloodless. It’s a crypt comedy.

Bud (Leigh McCormack) spends his days in a bemused swoon; his doting mother and brothers and sister indulge his quietude. He doesn’t have many friends but he’s comfortable in his own comfy lower-middle-class universe bounded by family and the movies. He escapes to the cinema and sits rapt before the screen.

In case we didn’t recognize that moviegoing is a religious experience for Bud, Davies at one point intercuts shots of him watching a movie and attending Mass. This high-toned religiosity is deeply felt yet spurious: There’s something self-serving about the way Davies equates movie-making with a holy crusade--it confers on “The Long Day Closes” (rated PG for thematic elements and mild language) a moral importance it doesn’t quite earn.

If only the pasty-faced Bud were more expressive and animated. He’s supposed to be living out the most exuberant time of his life but he spends most of the movie as a blank. Bud’s gravity is perhaps intended as a way of conveying how we look back on ourselves through the scrim of adulthood. But he’s the only one who comes across with such somberness. The effect is a bit like a variation on “Hope and Glory” with a zombie at its center.

Davies uses the popular songs and movies of the time for a raucously forlorn effect; it’s similar to what Dennis Potter has achieved in his scripts but without Potter’s poisonousness or wit. The songs create an echo chamber of mood and memory, though, and so do many of the images, like Bud’s mother (Marjorie Yates) cradling her son and singing a song her father taught her, or the shadows of rain flowing against Bud’s window. (It looks like weeping.) Davies is an acquired taste, all right. It helps if you like the taste of ashes.

‘The Long Day Closes’

Marjorie Yates Mother

Leigh McCormack Bud

Anthony Watson Kevin

Nicholas Lamont John

A British Film Institute and Film Four International presentation of a BFI production. A Sony Pictures Classics release. Director Terence Davies. Producer Olivia Stewart. Executive producers Ben Gibson and Colin MacCabe. Screenplay Davies. Cinematographer Michael Coulter. Editor William Diver. Costumes Monica Howe. Production design Christopher Hobbs. Art director Kave Naylor. Running time: 1 hour, 22 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG (for thematic elements and mild language).