Morbid man, ill girl are 'Restless'

Two movies about young people battling cancer, each with a very different approach, arrive in local theaters today. One, "50/50," stars Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as beer-drinking buddies, and the other, Gus Van Sant's "Restless," features Mia Wasikowska as an artistic girl who loves nature.

Care to guess which is the more emotionally resonant film? The answer might surprise you.

Van Sant, an almost quiveringly sensitive director, overplays his heightened style in "Restless." It's the story of a morbid young man, Enoch Brae (Henry Hopper, making his professional acting debut), and a terminally ill girl, Annabel Cotton (Wasikowska). They meet cute at a memorial service: Annabel pegs Encoh as a funeral-crashing hobbyist but promises not to tell. After she admits that she's heading toward her own funeral, the two oddballs develop a tentative but increasingly tender relationship.

It's a darkly quirky premise, but blatantly stolen from "Harold and Maude," the 1971 classic whose pasty-faced star, Bud Cort, might qualify as the first "goth." Enoch and Annabel, however, seem like late-adopting fashionistas: He broods in Victorian coats and knee-high boots, she dresses like Zelda Fitzgerald. Their interests seem as carefully chosen as their outfits: Enoch's best friend is an imaginary kamikaze pilot, Hiroshi (Ryo Kase), while Annabel memorizes the taxonomical nomenclature of wildlife.

Wasikowska and Hopper share some movingly intimate scenes, and Van Sant effectively creates a dream world with its own odd, internal symbolism (at least three people show up in Japanese World War II uniforms). But the movie's serious subject is trivialized by all the self-conscious stylishness. The coarse jokes of Seth Rogen in "50/50" seem a more honest reaction to tragedy than the visual poetry of "Restless."