It’s not surprising that “Restless,” Gus Van Sant’s first major studio project since “Finding Forrester” a decade ago, ended up being shifted from Columbia Pictures — which scrapped a planned January release — to its specialty-film sibling, Sony Pictures Classics.
The death-themed “Restless” has enough quirks for half a dozen Sundance indie premieres. But unlike Van Sant’s grittier, less sentimental recent small films, it’s twee enough to make your teeth ache. It’s the director’s biggest miscalculation since “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” 18 years ago.
Co-produced by actress Bryce Dallas Howard and her power-player dad Ron, it does introduce an interesting screen personality: Henry Hopper, son of the late Dennis Hopper.
While this is no “Rebel Without a Cause,” Hopper manages as well as you could expect as a death-obsessed high school student who hooks up with a young woman dying of cancer.
She is played by Mia Wasikowska, who brightened recent remakes of “Alice in Wonderland” and “Jane Eyre” but seems entirely too chipper, not to mention radiant-looking, under the circumstances. It doesn’t help that her character’s sole narrative function is to help Hopper reach closure after the death of his parents in a car accident.
They meet cute when he crashes a memorial service for a friend of hers at a hospital where she regularly undergoes chemotherapy.
Besides the hovering shadow of death, what these two have in common is a love for wearing vintage clothes — which sometimes upstage the actors wearing them.
The film’s best sequence takes place on Halloween, when this short-term couple discreetly make love in a crypt-like building.
By this point, Hopper is beginning to have fantasies about a Romeo-like suicide when his Juliet expires.
It’s hard not to wonder what Tim Burton, who has a natural affinity for dark whimsy that generally eludes Van Sant, could have done with this material.
The lovers regularly have conversations with the ghost of a World War II kamikaze pilot (Ryo Kase) in screenwriter Jason Lew’s adaptation of his own play, which ends up writing itself into a tear-soaked corner.
Wasikowska may be Hollywood’s most attractive dying woman since Ali MacGraw (even with a Mia Farrow bob), but “Restless” is no “Love Story.”