North Star review – Kristin Scott Thomas makes a ho-hum directorial debut

This year’s unusual fall festival season, almost entirely devoid of stars and missing some notable big titles, continues with a hushed kick-off for Toronto, a red carpet rolled out but left mostly untrodden. It was as muted inside as it was outside for the premiere of North Star, a rather underwhelming family drama that marks the directorial debut of Kristin Scott Thomas, an actor who one can never see enough of in front of the camera but one who hasn’t quite proved her worth behind it just yet, her film never deserving anything more than a shrug.

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Not that her low-key story of sisters reuniting for their mother’s wedding was ever intended to grab us by the shoulders – it’s far too gentle for that - but it should at least carry with it a great deal more charm or character than it does, something that no amount of idyllic English countryside shots can fix. Using a key element of her own family history as well as the tone of her one-time colleague Richard Curtis, Scott Thomas has introduced herself as a mostly competent film-maker but as a screenwriter with important lessons to learn. Co-written with journalist John Micklethwait, North Star is a film that often finds itself an interesting or challenging idea, only to leave it unexplored or cast aside in the place of something drabber instead. It’s a soft-pedalled soap with stars who know and can do better.

Scarlett Johansson plays a recently promoted navy captain, trying to balance a demanding job with her role as mother and partner to Freida Pinto’s frustrated girlfriend, Sienna Miller plays a Hollywood star, unable to maintain a marriage or long-term relationship and Emily Beecham plays a hard-working nurse who suspects her brash, boorish husband is cheating on her. They’re brought together at their family home to celebrate the third wedding of their mother, played by Scott Thomas, a reunion that causes them all to reflect on the hows and whys of where their lives are at. The key detail carried over from Scott Thomas’s life is that she lost both her father and stepfather to combat and in the film this weighs heavy on Johansson’s character especially, the loss haunting her as she both returns to the home and takes on a position that pays tribute to their legacies.

But in her one major stylistic flourish as director, Scott Thomas decides to animate Johansson’s memories, a disastrously twee and ineffective decision that sucks any emotive power from her flashbacks. Perhaps the argument would be made that the cutesy Raymond Briggs-esque soujourns are meant to show how one’s memory can be unreliably rose-tinted and unfairly gendered (one of the film’s more alluring half-ideas) but they’re distractingly out-of-place, not helped by Johansson being the weakest link of the three, struggling with an awkward British accent and confusing stiffness for stoicism. Miller and Beecham are both excellent, the former’s comic delivery elevating some of her ho-hum dialogue, and the latter almost convincing us that she’s playing a real person, even when the script forced her into laughably far-fetched diversions.

We’re never quite sure how seriously we’re supposed to take North Star, as either grounded family drama or knockabout sitcom, with bursts of cartoonishly absurd comedy (a silly sub-plot involving a detective trying to ensnare a cheater crescendoes with a bizarrely bawdy reveal) blunting the impact of the graver, talkier scenes surrounding (a tonal balance that Curtis managed so effortlessly). The film never really nails the long, lived-in history of a sibling dynamic with specific detail kept at a minimum, never cutting quite as close to the bone as it should and when shouty conflict does arrive in the last act, it’s triggered by a baffling, so-what revelation that’s too tame to make sense as the gas that finally causes a house fire. There’s a far more persuasive scene after with Scott Thomas giving herself a monologue filled with more nuance and thoughtfulness than the entirety of the film preceding it but it’s too little too late, a frustrating insight into what this could have become had it been made with a clearer idea of what it’s trying to be.

In the murky sea of directorial debuts from established actors, there have been far, far worse attempts than North Star but it’s just too insubstantial to register as anything than a footnote and definitely not enough to justify any drastic career change.

• North Star is screening at the Toronto film festival with a release date to be announced