Producers: Christian Nilsson, Saraleah Cogan, Rob Hinderliter, Alex Robbins, Terence Krey, Eric Tabach and Dave Brick     Director: Christian Nilsson   Screenplay: Christian Nilsson   Cast: Finn Wittrock, R.J. Mitte, Jake Weary, Amy Forsyth, Sam Strike, Mary Mallen, Joy Suprano, Dan Lauria, Luke Slattery, Chris Gray, Emily Jayne, Gabrielle Manna, Joshua Screen, Roxanne Schiebergen, Ritchie Coster and Tovah Feldshuh   Distributor: Obscured Releasing

Grade: C-

The trauma of going home again is played out once more in writer-director Christian Nilsson’s Long Island-set drama.  Unfortunately, the difficulty Tom Bell, a neophyte filmmaker, has in returning to the town he fled in shame will probably be equaled by that you’ll have in trying to sit through “Westhampton,” a stilted, dreary drama about a guy coming to terms with his past that says little we’ve not heard before, and more compellingly told. 

Finn Wittrock, acting all nervous and fidgety, is Bell, who’s haunted by a car accident involving him and his girlfriend on the night of their high school graduation.  Indeed, his semi-autobiographical film, also called “Westhampton,” centers around that unhappy event; we see excerpts from it periodically in which Luke Slattery plays the character called Tom and Emily Jayne his girlfriend Beth, who dies when their car hits a tree.  Others portrayed in his movie are Tom’s best buddies Dickie (Chris Gray), who’s Beth’s brother, and Jay (Joshua Screen), along with Beth’s BFF Kim (Gabrielle Manna), Jay’s girlfriend.  All we’re told is that at Beth’s urging she and Tom were trying to leave town for good.

Now Tom’s returned to the place he’d abandoned precipitously after the accident, leaving bad feelings behind, especially on the part of Dickie (now played by Jake Weary), a cop who blames him not only for the accident but for failing to take responsibility and properly apologize—and who takes the opportunity to beat him up a bit.  But Jay (now Sam Strike) and Kim (now Mary Mallen) also hold a grudge; they’re suing him for using their characters in his film without permission.  Still, Jay, a recovering addict, ignores the restraining order he and his wife have taken out against Bell to go to a nearby diner with him, where he encourages him to make amends to the people he’s wronged.  Those would include Beth (now Roxanne Schiebergen) who, contrary to what Tom’s movie suggests, didn’t die.  She is, however, confined to a wheelchair, and their reunion is strained.

Bell has supposedly come home to clear some things out of the family house, but he’s allowed himself to be talked into screening his movie for a local film class, where he causes a ruckus when he gets belligerent and physical with the chair of the department (Ritchie Coster) who presses him about its obvious biographical elements during a post-screening Q&A.  He also gets annoyed by questions about why he shot it in black-and-white.  (The obvious reason is that his having done so allows Nilsson and editor Terence Krey to splice in the excerpts without worrying about confusing the audience.) 

But the major question about his film is why it’s supposedly held in such high regard that some Hollywood honchos are considering funding his next project; from what we see of it, it’s basically on the level of the kind of pretentious student film one might encounter in any third-tier festival, and one will perhaps agree with a comment about it Tom has overheard describing it as a “shitty ‘Garden State.’”

Not everyone in Westhampton, however, greets Tom with disdain.  His old neighbor Mr. Romney (veteran Dan Lauria), while not effusive, is tolerant, and librarian Mrs. Lucas (Tovah Feldshuh), popping up toward the close, hosts a screening that goes appreciably better than the first one.  There’s also Avery (Amy Forsyth), a pushy high school reporter seeking an interview; her attitude is more self-centered than most, but she plays an important role in providing Tom, without his knowledge, with the drugs that give Wittrock the opportunity to go mildly bonkers—a nearly obligatory episode in a going-home movie like this. 

And then there’s Fitz (R.J. Mitte), a goofy but friendly old acquaintance who happily shows Bell around the old haunts, and takes him to the beachfront festival with which the film closes.  There Tom finds himself in a chintzy tarpaulin maze where, in a puzzling scene that’s apparently meant to have some deep meaning, he finally confronts the past and, presumably, achieves a sense of closure.   It’s a flat and enigmatic end to a movie that up until that point has been crushingly literal and soap-operatic.

Wittrock remains at the center of things throughout, but his performance is mannered and one-note.  The others barely get by—the kids in the black-and-white movie-within-a-movie sequences are quite amateurish—but Mitte and Feldshuh easily come off best, the former for his glaze-eyed wackiness and the latter for her simple likability.  Visually the film is bland, with Casey McCoy’s production design nondescript, but cinematographer Dave Brick’s work is professional, and he manages some arresting beach images.  Nicholas Marks’s score is unexceptional.

As far as problematic conduct goes, anybody who sees “Westhampton” will have to judge how much guilt Tom Bell bears.  But one thing is clear: a guy like Dickie, with his anger issues and propensity for violence, should never come anywhere near a badge or a gun.