'SOLSTICE' NOT EXACTLY THE SHORTEST DAY AT THE MOVIES.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

IT'S EASY to understand the appeal ``Winter Solstice'' held for Anthony LaPaglia and Allison Janney.

Both actors spend most of their time making sharply written TV dramas (``Without a Trace'' and ``The West Wing,'' respectively). So when an indie hiatus project like this comes along, with its everyday people and their reticent, semi-articulate verbal ways, it must look like a welcome and rewarding exercise in low-key realism.

LaPaglia and Janney play the heck out of their underformed characters, as do the film's other two major actors, Aaron Stanford and Mark Webber. It's a fine display of controlled, unemphatic and honest presentation by all.

And is it ever boring.

If director Josh Sternfeld's script had interesting characteristics before it was put through the Sundance Film Festival Screenwriter's Lab blender, they've been left behind. Capturing the everyman is the unwavering agenda here, but if that means that dull people have problems too, well, we knew that. We also know that there's a reason why movies usually aren't made about them.

Proclaiming its intentions with an opening shot of a kitchen sink, ``Solstice'' follows the ... um, crisis is it? ... of a motherless, suburban New Jersey family one summer. Huh? Oh, their last name is Winters. Most of the movie's cleverness was spent on that play-on-words title.

Dad Jim (LaPaglia) runs a landscaping business. Oldest son Gabe (Stanford), who works at a supermarket and has a nice but disposable girlfriend, announces one evening that he's moving to Tampa. Someone later mentions that that's got to be the dullest town in Florida. The audience I saw the movie with laughed out loud, certain that, if so, Gabe will feel right at home.

Younger son Pete (Webber) never seems to finish high school and gets into pointless fights in the convenience store parking lot. The only other place to hang out at night in this burg is the basketball court or the Dairy Queen, and he haunts those locations, too.

Jim doesn't like either of his sons' life trajectories, but they're all he's got. Until a lady his age, Molly (Janney), sets to housesitting down the block. He lends her a hand truck, she cooks dinner. Things look up.

Where's Mrs. Winters, you ask? Well, obviously, something has befallen her, and that's why all the menfolk are so mopey. An hour into this series of trite interactions, Jim finally brings himself to choke out the details of his wife's fate. It is, of course, tragic. Unfortunately, it's also about the most common tragedy that could strike a family, and even movies that Sean Penn directs cover the subject and its fallout with far more specific and compelling drama than ``Solstice'' does.

Filmed as flatly as it is scripted, ``Winter Solstice'' has little to say about family dynamics because it just doesn't do enough to individuate this potentially interesting household of grieving, unsatisfied men. Minimalist domestic dramas can be rare cinematic treasures - Japan's great Yasujiro Ozu's main body of work is the timeless example - but there is all the distinction in the world between subtlety and nothing really happening.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

WINTER SOLSTICE - Two stars

(R: language, mild violence)

Starring: Anthony LaPaglia, Aaron Stanford, Mark Webber, Allison Janney.

Director: Josh Sternfeld.

Running time: 1 hr. 30 min.

Playing: Sunset 5, West Hollywood; Westside Pavilion, West L.A.

In a nutshell: Dreary slice-of-life about a father and two sons coping with the loss of the lady of the house. More interesting characters would have helped.