Titled “Almost Christmas’’ when it debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival, director Phil Morrison’s relentlessly depressing and sluggish followup to his delightful “Junebug’’ is worth enduring only for a rare lead performance by Paul Giamatti, whose expert delineation of rage and frustration lends form to Morrison’s otherwise shapeless script.
Giamatti plays a misanthropic French-Canadian, released from prison after a four-year stretch for robbery, who learns his estranged wife, Therese (Amy Landecker) has told their daughter he died of cancer. Worse, Therese is sleeping with his former partner in crime (Paul Rudd, who never gets a handle on his character), who eluded apprehension.
Giamatti guilt-trips Rudd into taking him along on a trip, selling Christmas trees on a desolate and freezing street corner in Williamsburg. Their misadventures in the Big Apple, including Giamatti’s involvement with a Russian house sitter (a bizarrely cast Sally Hawkins) are neither funny nor touching, just tedious.
“All is Bright’’ had my wife fleeing for the exit after half an hour. You’re going to have to admire Giamatti (who co-produced with his own wife) an awful lot to make it through this one, which is getting only a token theatrical release, despite the names in its cast.