Jim Winters (Anthony LaPaglia) is the grieving widower and his two gawky boys, Gabe (Aaron Stanford) and Pete (Mark Webber), are a blue-collar Joe and an undisciplined high school student, respectively. We learn, Door in the Floor-like (not to mention A Home at the End of the World-/Ordinary People-/The Upside of Anger-/Imaginary Heroes-like) that there's lingering trauma from the death of a loved one, and once spinster Molly Ripkin (Allison Janney) moves in down the street, we know from long experience that she might have the right spark to rekindle Jim's flame.

It's embarrassing that the family's name is "Winters" and that the picture's title is Winter Solstice--just as it's embarrassing to be forced to note that the solstice is the longest, coldest night of the year and that our three sub-vocal menfolk are engaged in their own little emotional ice age. I'm not certain, though, for whom exactly it's embarrassing, since there's little doubt that Sternfeld is probably pleased that no one has missed his brickbat metaphors and intent in such passages as the one where landscaper Jim tells Molly that tending to a garden is harder than planting one. (And there's little doubt that people going to see Winter Solstice on their own impetus are hungry for this sort of stately, bold-faced, upper-middle class chamber drama.) So the boys are overripe on the vine, the one leaving town and leaving behind clear-eyed Stacey (Michelle Monaghan, a find) and the other trickling his life away on being a distraction in icky Mr. Bricker's (Ron Livingston) history class. The boys aren't the only ones in need of pruning.