Has there ever been a definitive study on the prevalence of the particularly virulent strain of Hollywood cancer among those carrying the XX chromosome?

While watching Gus Van Sant's slight Restless, a fresh and original tale in which a beautiful sick girl changes the mindset of a cynical young man, all I could think about was why no one seems to care about the scourge that has been sweeping screenplays everywhere for decades: hundreds of women have died to serve lazy narratives. WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE STARLETS?

Enoch (Henry Hopper) is an orphan who lives with his aunt and spends much of his time conversing with Hiroshi (Ryō Kase), the ghost of a World War II kamikaze pilot, who provides him with advice about life and love that the stroppy Enoch tends to dismiss when he feels like it.

Enoch is also an aimless drifter who gets his kicks by attending strangers' funerals. When he is finally busted by a funeral parlour employee after attending a bunch in the same week, Annabel (Mia Wasikowska) swoops in to save the day. She tells him she's a volunteer at the local hospital, Enoch replies "Cancer kids?" and she corrects him: "Kids with cancer."

The pair start hanging out together, discussing death and avian biology (put a bird on it!), and doing other exceedingly twee things. It's not long before Annabel reveals that she is, herself, a "kid with cancer". Not only that, but she has roughly three months to live.

(None of this is a surprise to anyone who has seen either the trailer or any film released in the last 45 years that features a beautiful woman with a secret health problem.)

Nevertheless, they become boyfriend and girlfriend and are determined to Make Every Day Count in the way that people in these sorts of films tend to do. Can a dying girl make a death-obsessed boy learn to love life? We'll have the answer right after this Sufjan Stevens song.

Van Sant is really phoning it in with this limp indie romance. He's not helped by first-timer Jason Lew's script, which at one point has Annabel cram two exceedingly obvious metaphors into the space of about five minutes (including one howler about a bird that thinks it dies each night, so sings in the morning, happy to be alive for another day).

Hopper (son of Dennis) is one of the more uncharismatic leads of recent memory, not helped by his character's lot; Enoch's habit of ending sentences with "or whatever" as a sort of disaffected full stop is cringe-inducing. He's better when he perks up (such as when he and Annabel are busted, in the post-coital glow, by a forest-dwelling trapper), but for the most part it's a 1.5 note performance.

Wasikowska could make the phonebook entertaining, so it's no surprise that her Annabel is appealing, but she is nevertheless saddled with a character that is less a person than a symptom of lazy screenwriting. Likewise, the gentle and still Ryō rises above the material, and you may find yourself wishing for Enoch to drop dead if only it meant we got to spend more time with his spectral Battleship partner.

Restless is basically Sweet November for the Frankie Magazine set, passed through a Tumblr filter of delicate bird engravings and autumn leaves. Sufjan Stevens songs occasionally provide a plaintive break from Danny Elfman's score, which is syrupy enough to induce sudden onset diabetes. Hell, the film was even shot in Portland, Oregon.

The film tries for gallows humour at times but ends up falling short into a fluffy pillow embroidered with love hearts. If you want a cinematic exploration of grief and death that offers true catharsis, see Burning Man.

If, instead, you want to be mollycoddled by misguided whimsy, just wait for Restless to be released on one of those five-for-the-price-of-one DVDs at Safeway, along with Love Story, A Walk To Remember, Sweet November and Love And Other Drugs.

- Two stars


Restless opens in cinemas on Thursday, December 1.