Producers: Annmarie Sairrino, Moeko Suzuki and Kat McPhee    Director: Sonja O’Hara   Screenplay: David Ebeltoft   Cast: Danny Ramirez, Keana Marie, Mark St. Cyr, Lydia Hearst, Sam A. Coleman, Breon Pugh, Kate Edmonds, Terry J. Nelson, Dodie Brown and Jonetta Kaiser   Distributor: Entertainment Squad

Grade: C-

Not so much adapted from as inspired by a Japanese video game issued by Kadokawa in 2016, Sonja O’Hara’s film is supposed to be a mystery about a young man, Carlos Alvarez (Danny Ramirez), searching for a young woman, Sarah Blake (Keana Marie, who’s disappeared.  But though an earnest attempt to portray the damage done by the opioid crisis, it fails simply on a narrative level.

In the script by David Ebeltoft, Carlos and Sarah have never met in person.  Both were given a school assignment to write letters to a randomly chosen pen pal, and they happened to be paired.  Carlos lives in Tulsa, and when he receives Sarah’s first letter he’s hospitalized after a beating from the father of a girl he’s been sleeping with.  He writes back, and the correspondence continues while he recuperates.  But eventually the letters stop, and it’s not until a year later that he receives a final one—postage due, no less—that is just a desperate scrawl in which Sarah says she’s responsible for someone’s death and apologizes.

Troubled, Carlos decides to travel to Sarah’s home town of Baton Rouge to find her and learn what happened.  From this point the plot jumps back and forth between his search and a dramatization of what led Sarah to write him that final note, but the two tracks aren’t really parallel, since the one is chronologically distant from the other and, quite frankly, Carlos’ meandering efforts, while they manage to unearth the gist of things, don’t actually reveal the all facts, which are often parceled out pretty much independent of his investigation.

In that earlier timeline, Sarah was living a sad life, her mother Karen (Lydia Hearst) a strung-out, nasty, demanding addict.  And she was involved with an equally troubled crowd.  Her best friend Zoe (Kate Edmonds) is linked up with Jackson (Sam A. Coleman), who’s looking to move up in the drug trade controlled by Adam (Mark St. Cyr).  To that end he persuades good-natured, nervous Caleb, Adam’s nephew who’s sweet on Sarah, to steal a bottle of pills from Adam’s stash for sale.

Meanwhile, Sarah goes to a party and gets smashed after realizing her boyfriend has moved on, collapsing in the backyard of William and Diane Hayden (Terry J. Nelson and Dodie Brown).  One might suspect that these two suburbanites, with their clean-cut lawn, fine garden and spiffy home, might turn out to be malevolent, but far from it; they’re a kindly couple who put Sarah up in the bedroom of their departed daughter Emma, feed her and offer her every sort of aid they can.  But Emma, the obsessive housewife, is actually devastated by the loss of her child, and Sarah notices that she’s on a whole collection of pills to deal with depression and pain.

That private stock becomes a target of opportunity for Jackson and Caleb, who must make up Adam’s loss, and Zoe pulls Sarah into the scheme.  Naturally things go terribly wrong, and when Carlos finally visits the Hayden house, it’s no longer the bucolic-looking place it once was. 

Sarah’s story is told in very gritty terms by O’Hara and her production team—production designer Jessica Keli Govea and cinematographer Dan McBride, with the solemn pacing and a spare score by Jessica Weiss adding to the gloomy feel.  And the acting in these flashback sequences is committed, if sometimes overly intense (Hearst being a primary offender in that respect); but Marie is quite good in what amounts to the lead, and the others are at least acceptable, though Nelson and Brown come seem to have dropped in from another movie as almost ethereal fairy godparents. 

Unfortunately, Ramirez makes a sleepy, rather dull-witted searcher, whose somnolent queries lead him to a beat-down more often than a revelation, and Stephanie Filo’s editing doesn’t so much clarify what’s happening so much as make it more needlessly murky.   And when the picture reaches its climax in a conversation between Carlos and Sarah’s friend Mia (Jonetta Kaiser), the movie simply glides over how the clue she provides results in a major discovery, though it’s meant provides emotional release in suggesting what Sarah was longing for all along.

Anyone expecting a movie based on a video game to be exciting will be disappointed by “Root Letter.”  Instead this little drama exhibits a yearning for depth which its messy structure, stodgy pace and uneven acting sabotage.  But it’s not a total loss: there are some glimmers of future promise along the way.     

Producers: Anthony Bregman, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Stefanie Azpiazu   Directors: Nat Faxon and Jim Rash   Screenplay: Jesse Armstrong, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash   Cast: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Will Ferrell, Zach Woods, Zoë Chao, Miranda Otto, Giulio Berruti, Julian Grey, Ammon Jacob Ford and Kristofer Hivju   Distributor: Searchlight Pictures

Grade:  C-

Ruben Östlund’s cool, sharp 2014 Swedish black comedy about a family’s emotional disintegration as a result of an act of cowardice in the face of an incoming avalanche at a ski resort inspired this English-language version, which misfires on virtually all cylinders; rarely has a title more accurately described a movie’s trajectory from original to misguided reworking.

In this version, Billie and Pete Stanton (Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell) arrive at a posh, modernistic Alpine resort with their sons Finn (Julian Grey) and Emerson (Ammon Jacob Ford).  Their marriage seems no better than okay, and though they all hit the slopes, none of the four seem to be enjoying themselves all that much, often taking to their rooms to watch television or play video games.  The conversation between Billie and Pete seems a little strained, too. 

Things change for the worse when, in a trip to the deck of the restaurant overlooking the mountains, they hear one of the distant rumbles—controlled explosions to keep the runs right—that have punctuated their stay and watch in horror as a wave of snow comes from the mountains toward them.  Pete quickly takes action, but hardly of the heroic sort: he runs to safety into the restaurant, leaving his wife and kids at the table to fend for themselves. 

The threat subsides, but the effect of Pete’s split-second decision hovers over the rest of the vacation: Billie’s angry not only at his apparent cowardice, but at his refusal to admit what he’d done.  The division between them explodes during an evening with Pete’s work buddy Zach (Zach Woods) and his girlfriend Rosie (Zoë Chao), whom Pete’s invited to join them despite Billie’s opposition (and then lied to her about it), and leads her to distance herself from him for the rest of their stay; only her desire to help him regain a degree of stature in their sons’ eyes prevents what looks like a marital disintegration, with her sharing an afternoon with a handsome ski instructor (Giulio Berruti) and him going on a sad, drunken adventure with Zach.       

One might have expected that the makers would have taken the opportunity to transform the story into a wacky vehicle of the kind Ferrell specializes in, but such is not the case.  Though it lacks the pungency of Östlund’s film, this on-and-off remake remains basically a drama with comedic undertones, one of those movie in which Ferrell tries to stretch.  It certainly takes advantage of his general physical flabbiness and his ability to play befuddled, but his puzzled expression often seems to reflect the actor’s failure to fully inhabit the character rather than Pete’s effort to understand what’s happening and devise some way of dealing with it. As for Louis-Dreyfus, there’s not much humor at all to her intensity, though she shows a softer side toward the close, particularly in her scenes with the boys.

The family dynamic takes up most of the movie, but it’s egged on by episodes with other characters, not least those played by Woods and Chao, who are quite different from the equivalent couple in the original film but work fairly well.  A few scenes give Miranda Otto the opportunity to grab the limelight as a distinctly liberated (and bossy) resort employee—another figure from the original but more broadly drawn here, and there’s a funny sequence in which Pete and Billie, at her insistence, confront the manager of the place (Kristofer Hivju) over the avalanche scare—another instance in which Pete proves the wuss. 

Overall, though, these seem like digressions intended to camouflage the fact that as rewritten (removing, for example, the original’s closing bus sequence), this is a fairly flimsy script, with concerns about gender identities that are never coherently addressed.  Even with a relatively large number of skiing footage, “Downhill” clocks in at under ninety minutes, and at that, as edited by Pamela Martin and Dave Rennie, it feels overlong and rather flaccid.  It does look good, though, with cinematographer Danny Cohen obviously relishing the locations and Dave Warren’s production design.

Ultimately, though, this is a dramedy about emotional discomfort that will probably cause most viewers to feel uncomfortable themselves. And it’s one of the weirdest Valentine’s Day releases imaginable.     

Incidentally, there’s a bit of history to be found in “Downhill.”  It’s the first Searchlight film to be released since Disney struck “Fox” from the name.  But at least they retain the old Fox fanfare at the start; it would be sad to lose that.