'The Wizard of Loneliness' (PG-13)

"The Wizard of Loneliness" is Rockwell with angst, a dour but cutesy drama set in '40s Vermont where the sap runs thick. And the world is soft-focus, fuzzy and distorted as if seen through Bob Newhart's stretch socks. Lukas Haas stars as a California-bred enfant terrible who becomes an apple-cheeked, argyle-sweatering sweetheart in the company of his quirky New England relations. It's like "My Life as a Dog," but without charm.

Haas has the title role of Wendall Oler, a mean-spirited, Walter Mittyish 12-year-old who thinks he has a wizard's powers -- an irrelevant quality occasionally manifested in bad special effects. Wendall is taken in by his quirky grandparents after his mother dies and his father goes off to World War II. The poor man enlisted after Wendall put a dead bird in a shoe he was going to wear to his wife's funeral.

The sullen brat is even crueler to his Quaint-R-Us kinfolk. But unlike the audience, these kindhearts have sympathy for the child, a character too ominous for the lollipop backdrop. "It's a wonder I don't have a stroke the way some people treat me," says Granny. "Why don't you?" says Wendall, who has been stealing from her purse and is planning to kill the neighborhood bully with her sewing scissors. When his adorable little cousin's father is killed in combat, Wendall tells him to stop crying. "Kids whose parents are dead are lucky." All too gradually, and all too predictably, Wendall's heart thaws.

In a psychotic subplot, the boy begins to spy on his attractive aunt Sybil (Lea Thompson) who is involved with a creepy veteran (Dylan Baker), a high school boyfriend she had believed dead. He is, in fact, recently escaped from a maximum security military asylum. The MPs come for him, but Sybil shields him even though he has raped her, attempted to kill her son with an ice cream sundae dish, and cut holes in his own head to relieve the pressure. Frankly the Oler Family seems on the slow side, like Yankee versions of slack-jawed hillbilly feebs.

And if they weren't so masochistic, they would have smacked Wendall's britches good as soon as he got off the train. And we would have been spared this dull metamorphosis directed by low-budget filmmaker Jenny Bowen from a screenplay based on the novel by John Nichols of "The Milagro Beanfield War." Bet the Wizard is nowhere near as lonely as the folks selling tickets will be.