`CONSTELLATION' MOVES DULLY, SLOWLY THROUGH ITS PHASES.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

Wouldn't an inspiring African-American family drama with articulate characters, minimal vulgarity and almost no dependence on old-time religion be refreshing in this era of Tyler Perry's reductive stereotyping?

It would if it wasn't as deadly dull as ``Constellation,'' a movie whose abundant smarts are fatally compromised by its writer-director Jordan Walker-Pearlman's rudimentary filmmaking skills.

Slow and ultimately muddled, this effort wastes some fine acting and dialogue on a poorly staged drama that should end up saying more than it does.

Some key exchanges literally glow with emotional and intellectual honesty, though, which makes the overall failure of the piece all the more frustrating.

This is most painfully apparent whenever the largest presence in the ensemble cast, Billy Dee Williams, is in a scene. It seems to take the onetime charm generator forever to walk through a frame, and longer to change a facial expression.

He plays Helms Boxer, a Paris-based artist who returns to his Huntsville, Ala., hometown following the death of his widely loved older sister Carmel (played by Gabrielle Union in numerous flashbacks). Helms has apparently been emotionally numb -- or was he just using that as an excuse not to commit to the women in his life and the two daughters he fathered? -- since witnessing a traumatic incident involving Carmel when he was a boy.

Seems she was deeply in love with a young white man, and although the feelings were mutual, segregation prevented the young man from marrying her. Now old and filled with regrets and played by ``thirtysomething's'' David Clennon, the guy is paying for Carmel's funeral.

Helms wants nothing to do with the ceremony and is only marginally more interested in reuniting with his adult daughters, Zoe Saldana's Rosa and Melissa de Sousa's Lucy, and their respective mothers (Rae Dawn Chong and Lesley Ann Warren).

Of course, he comes around slowly. Very, very slowly, but it's what Carmel surely would have wanted.

Saldana gets top acting honors as the youngest, most resentful Boxer, with second place going to Hill Harper as her ex-boyfriend Errol, who genuinely if awkwardly wants her back. Both Chong and Warren are feisty and morally strong without coming off as scolds. Union looks luminous but is much too idealized in her flashbacks.

Whatever the film wants to say about interracial relationships is superseded by the various family dynamics at play. That keeps finger-wagging to a minimum, but it would have been nice to have come away with a clearer notion of what the mixed-race Walker-Pearlman (his grandma was a Harlem activist and his uncle is Gene Wilder) thinks about the subject.

Beyond, of course, the obvious fact that times have really changed -- and, despite individuals' foibles, unquestionably for the better.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

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CONSTELLATION - Two stars

(PG-13: language, racism)

Starring: Zoe Saldana, Billy Dee Williams, Lesley Ann Warren, Hill Harper, Rae Dawn Chong, Melissa de Sousa, Gabrielle Union, David Clennon.

Director: Jordan Walker-Pearlman.

Running time: 1 hr. 36 min.

Playing: Magic Johnson Crenshaw 15, Baldwin Hills; Regal Stadium 26, Long Beach; Galleria South Bay 16, Redondo Beach.

In a nutshell: Glacially paced interracial family drama has some nice, articulate scenes but is ultimately tedious and muddled.

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Photo:

Melissa de Sousa and Billy Dee Williams star in ``Constellation.''