Vincent Wants to Sea

This is a bright, broad, silly, harmless movie whose sweetness is a means to an end.

Complacent with road-movie tropes, director Ralf Huettner and screenwriter Florian David Fitz's Vincent Wants to Sea is likeable insofar as it's familiar.

The picture's quiet performances and occasionally surprising moments take it just far enough off the beaten path to make it more than a transparently formulaic feel-good story.

What's missing is any of the real-life messiness that might have lifted this material from its creatively tic-ridden confines.

Trapped inside the German film Vincent Wants to Sea there's an affecting father-son drama, an amusing road movie, a quirky romantic comedy and a non-patronizing take on mental illness. What we actually get - a homogenized movie-of-the-week set against the Alps and punctuated by anodyne English-language pop songs - brought out the cynic in me.

The principal characters can be reduced to a handful of tics, and the entire story line is immaculately devoid of incidental detail. It's like sitting in a padded cell for about 90 minutes.

If Vincent Wants to Sea proves nothing else, it's that a moronically quirky take on mental illness is no more palatable when it's subtitled.