‘Waterland’ (R)

"Waterland" makes a valiant attempt to create a coherent movie from a highly interior, meandering novel. Screenwriter Peter Prince and director Stephen Gyllenhaal siphon emotional essences from Graham Swift's 1982 waterside saga, then pour them into a wobbly vessel.

The adaptation doesn't quite hold. But in this flashback narrative, set in England's beautiful eastern wetlands, there are many passages of filmic -- and geographic -- beauty. The movie is also peopled with memorable, new British faces, including Grant Warnock, Lena Headey and David Morrissey. Leading the older faces is Jeremy Irons, who more than holds his own as the central character.

History teacher Irons finds himself at the rumpled end of his 20-year career in an American high school. The Englishman is also at crisis point with emotionally unreeling wife Sinead Cusack. When bratty student Ethan Hawke challenges Irons to justify the existence of his subject, Irons's past comes to bear. In an attempt to inform and entertain his class, the teacher launches into his own, troubled history.

Irons's yarn, dating back to before World War I, tells of the Fens, a marshy area reclaimed from the sea that even today, he says, is "not quite solid." His life there has been one of disparate ups and downs, from romantic bliss to tragic loss. He curls the hair of his American students with frank descriptions of sexual dabblings on trains with his girlfriend. Irons awes them with stories about his retarded dredger-brother Morrissey, and Morrissey's obsession with eels. And, in a ridiculous, pseudo-Fellini move, Irons literally takes his students back through time on a surrealistic field trip to his mother's home.

"Stay together, don't get lost and no smoking in the house," says Irons, as the class gingerly enters this building of yore.

You're not sure whether to appreciate the film for its literary ambitions or take it to task for the same. "Waterland" feels like a collection of highlights, some memorable, some ordinary. As the younger Irons and Cusack, Warnock and Headey evoke a tender sense of sexual wonder as they meet at all available trysting spots, from trains to windmills. But after a traumatic event, they sow the seeds for banal, post-Freudian discontent in America.

With the benefit of Irons's presence, "Waterland" creates the sense of a man haunted by his past. But it doesn't steer the character-forming course satisfactorily. The fusion of past and present -- from Fens to classroom to Irons's American home with Cusack -- is confused and meandering; it loses its flimsy thread very quickly.

At best, you're left with an incomplete mosaic of impressions. In a "Mr. Chips"-like speech directed at Hawke, Irons explains himself as one created by his "disease of the fens," a love for homegrown stories about goblins, sprites, the mad woman of the marsh and tales of "sadness and despair." You simply have to take his word for it.