Movie Review

The Boys are Back

A manly tearjerker

Clive Owen (center, with costars Nicholas McAnulty and Emma Booth) plays a widowed dad in “The Boys Are Back.’’ (Matt Nettheim/Miramax Films)

By Ty Burr

Globe Staff / October 2, 2009

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Clive Owen weeps! It may not be up there with “Garbo laughs,’’ but the star’s turn as a grieving single dad in the earnest and rather too painless drama “The Boys Are Back’’ is a game-changer. In the decade since “Croupier’’ popped him loose, Owen has fashioned a brooding, intelligent action-hero persona in upscale thrillers like “Children of Men’’ and “Inside Man.’’ As those titles indicate, he is a man in a world of big-screen pretty boys. Lately, though, Owen has been stretching, even smiling. There was the raffish corporate spy of this year’s underrated “Duplicity’’ and now he gets verklempt in this manly sob story from Scott Hicks (“Shine’’).

Owen plays Joe Warr, a successful sportswriter for an Australian newspaper, whose life gets turned upside down when his wife (Laura Fraser) dies of cancer, leaving him with six-year-old Artie (Nicholas McAnulty). (The film’s based on a much more idiosyncratic memoir by British writer Simon Carr.) Up to now, Joe has been lucky to live the life of an overgrown lad, and after an extended bout of grieving he settles in to raise Artie in an atmosphere of enlightened fatherly anarchy. “I run a pretty loose ship,’’ he says. “Fewer rules but bigger rules. No fighting except for fun.’’

I can already hear the women in the audience clicking their tongues in dismay - as do Joe’s mother-in-law (Julia Blake) and the pretty single mom (Emma Booth) down the road. As does the movie, which sets out to show Joe the error of his ways in sympathetic but unforgiving increments. If there weren’t already enough women noodging him this way and that, the widower also chats regularly with his dead wife, present in his memory and within the camera frame - a shameless device that only the actors’ skill keeps from turning into runny cheese.

Complicating matters is the arrival from London of Harry (George MacKay), Joe’s teenage son from an earlier marriage. It’s in the scenes between these two that we’re allowed to take the full measure of Joe’s selfishness - he’s quite simply incapable of listening to anyone - even as Owen invests the character with the charm that has allowed him to get away with it for as long as he has.

All told, the movie’s a solid entry in the Bad Dad Gets It Together genre and Owen is really quite touching, especially when he’s not trying too hard, which is most of the time. “The Boys Are Back’’ is at its best finding humor and despair in the gulf that can yawn between fathers and sons - in the ways human connection can slide away in the many things manfully unsaid.

Unfortunately, the film’s production values blunt its pain. Joe and the boys live on what appears to be the very edge of Australia, in a warmly funky country house with endless vistas just over the horizon. It’s a blissful enough Chamber of Commerce vision - my screening companion came out wanting to book a flight immediately - but it sidetracks the drama, which is less about location and lifestyle than the urgent, even ugly need to be present in the lives of the people who love you.

“The Boys Are Back’’ tidily arranges its raw feelings about fathering and manhood into a decent, intelligent melodrama meant to soothe audiences and provoke no one. If there’s a harder, quirkier version of this tale in Carr’s book and in the back of Clive Owen’s eyes, it hasn’t quite made it to the screen.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation.