"Yes, dear, someday you can tell your therapist all about it. For now let's just pretend everything's fine, okay?"

Based on a short story by Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis is a wistful coming-of-age story set in a small, New England town. It concerns 11-year-old Bobby Garfield, a poor kid being raised by a single mother who would clearly rather be doing something else. A mysterious stranger, Ted Brautigan, moves into the apartment upstairs from them. He dodges questions about his past, occasionally goes into a trancelike state and often seems to . . . know things. He also asks Bobby to keep an eye out for signs of the "low men," who drive flashy cars and wear hats and are hunting for Ted.

In Stephen King math, Hearts in Atlantis = Stand by Me + The Green Mile - The Shawshank Redemption. Or you could think of it as It without that freaky clown. Like Stand By Me, it's framed by a sequence where the now adult protagonist learns of the death of a childhood friend, sending us off into a movie-length flashback. Like in It, we have a group of children menaced by some particularly nasty bullies. Like The Green Mile, there's a kindly man with a mysterious power. But the difference between Hearts in Atlantis and those previous stories is that they featured characters that the audience cared about. Somehow I just couldn't seem to work up much interest in Bobby or Ted, or Bobby's friends Carol and Sully, or his selfish mother Elizabeth. They didn't feel like real people to me, but like character types recycled from other, better films.

"We're in a Stephen King movie! If we play our cards right, we could have careers as good as Wil Wheaton's or Corey Feldman's! Oh, wait . . ."

What works in this movie is the performance of the wonderful Anthony Hopkins. He's sweet and charming without overplaying the sentimentality inherent in the script. He lets us see the different sides of Ted's character, the caginess that allows him to evade the low men as well as the love of life and open-heartedness that would prompt him to befriend a lonely young boy.

On the other hand, Hope Davis, playing Bobby's inattentive mother is pretty bad. Never one of my favorite actresses, Davis does little to liven up her bitter, desperate, but poorly written character. Her bland style worked for her character in Mumford, but here it just turns her uptight mom character into a caricature.

The direction by Scott Hicks (Shine, Snow Falling on Cedars) is lackluster as well. The pacing is dull and the tone rarely varies from sweet-natured nostalgia. The few scenes involving conflict or menace play well, but never amount to much of anything. By the time the movie wraps up, with a pat reconciliation between mother and son, you're left wondering what the story was really about.

If you're interested in five better movies based on Stephen King stories, I've made a list. (Don't act so surprised.)

Gorilla Pants rating: 1.5 out of 4 bananas