Shallow 'Dive' hits rock bottom

Midway into Lifetime's ''The Dive From Clausen's Pier," not long after the falling-in-love-in-Manhattan montage, Carrie and Kilroy are making mad, passionate love in his fabulous loft apartment. Topless, he's stretching up in an arc toward the ceiling; wearing a tight shirt, she's tucking down toward the bed. Necks are extended and contracted, positions are switched.

It's as romantic as a gymnastic routine, a sort of Pilates a deux, and it probably took the actors, Sean Maher and Michelle Trachtenberg, a few hours of earnest practice to coordinate it. Out of grateful admiration for their effort, along with the desire to continue laughing out loud, I rewound my preview tape to watch the pretty couple bob for apples on the ceiling all over again. When viewing ''The Dive From Clausen's Pier," which premieres tonight at 9, you need to take your pleasures where you can find them, cruel as they may be.

Otherwise, the movie, based on the Ann Packer novel, has little to offer. It's a painfully schematic and familiar story that we've already seen on every WB nighttime soap ever made -- call it ''Clausen's Creek" or ''Everwooden." Wisconsin girl Carrie (Trachtenberg) is about to dump her childhood boyfriend, Mike (Will Estes), when a tragic dive paralyzes him. To the strains of sappy alt rock, she takes a flight to New York and dons funky downtown threads. And she gets all ''La Boheme" with her artsy roommates, a thick-eyebrowed poet and a gay artist -- when she's not working out with Kilroy (Maher), that is.

The pacing is odd, in that some of the pivotal plot turns -- falling in love, falling out of love -- occur abruptly. Too often, we're expected to compensate for lapses in time sequencing. And Trachtenberg's wan performance doesn't help the flow. She fit into ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer" beautifully as Buffy's kid sister, and she was convincingly bratty last season on ''Six Feet Under." But in ''Clausen's Pier," she's relentlessly sulky, so numbed-out as to be a narrative cipher. She fails to show qualities that would make Carrie attractive to friends and lovers. She's a frowning stick figure -- an acrobatic, frowning stick figure.

Opposite her, Maher comes off like a fountain of color and expression. As a metrosexual who cooks for Carrie and speaks French to her in bed, he at least smiles and frowns. He also has a bit of mystery to him, since he refuses to tell Carrie anything about his past. Is he a cad? Is he a hero? Or is he just an escapee from ''One Tree Hill"?

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.