“Box of Moonlight,” written and directed by Tom Dicillo. Running time: 111 minutes. Rated R (for language, adult content, and brief nudity). Showing nightly, Monday-Thursday, at the Railroad Square Cinemas in Waterville.

The creaking you’re likely to hear while watching Tom DiCillo’s “Box of Moonlight” is not the theater’s ceiling, your companion’s arthritic knees, or the uncomfortable seat in which you sit restlessly, but indeed the film itself. “Moonlight” is so thick with story, it sags beneath its considerable weight and becomes something of a glutton for your time.

The film follows several days in the life of Al Fountain (John Turturro), an electrical engineer whose circuits are sputtering in midlife crisis. To his unhappy wife, Deb (Annie Corely), he is “Mr. Clockwork.” To his co-workers, he is “one of those guys who goes through life like a robot.” To the audience, he is a sad, rigid man who could be the poster boy for anal retention.

Everything Al does is by the clock. His life is a blueprint steeped in Ozzie and Harriet lore. You sense he got married at the right age, had a child at the right age, and is steamrolling straight ahead toward the comfortable retirement he’s read about in magazines, seen on television and thus planned for all his life. What he has not counted on is that this blueprint would fail him and lead to an overwhelming feeling of unhappiness. His relationships with his wife and son are strained, his co-workers dislike him, and he has lost focus on what matters (if he ever truly knew). When midlife crisis hits, it hits hard … and manifests itself uniquely.

Al begins to see things backward. In his effort to turn back the clock, he witnesses a child pedaling his bike in reverse. Coffee flows out of a mug and back into the coffee pot. Water retreats into the faucet. Desperate to find some meaning to his life, he rents a car and returns to a favorite childhood haunt, Splatchee Lake, where he summered as a child. But Splatchee Lake has become a wasteland: Destroyed by industry, poisoned with formaldehyde, it is a grotesque green goo reminiscent of Joyce’s fouled sea in “Ulysses” — and it is barren of life.

How then does Al return to life? Quite by accident, really. As he is driving away from Splatchee Lake, he turns a corner and nearly runs down The Kid (Sam Rockwell), a free spirit having car trouble. Al stops to help the young man, and in so doing finds in The Kid’s verve the key to living.

All this sounds interesting in concept, but the film fails to extend its few enjoyable moments into an engrossing whole. DiCillo, who is responsible for “Johnny Suede” and “Living in Oblivion,” sours his film with bad examples of symbolism. Al’s surname is too obvious, his rebirth occurs on Independence Day, and the box of moonlight metaphor would have been better left shelved and padlocked.

As the film stretches into its second hour, you find yourself checking the time much like Al Fountain — an irony that just happens to defeat the entire purpose of this movie. Grade: C-

Video of the Week

“The Loved One,” directed by Tony Richardson. Screenplay by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood. Running time: 122 minutes. Unrated.

Satirizing the unrooted, uncouth, uncultured American. Antonioni did it in “Zabriskie Point” and John Schlesinger did it in “Midnight Cowboy,” but neither did it as well as Tony Richardson in “The Loved One.”

Based on Evelyn Waugh’s scathing novel on Hollywood, “The Loved One” was ahead of its time when it was released in 1965, and has since become a cult classic. Initially billed as “the motion picture with something to offend everybody,” it has remained one of our best black comedies by satirizing not only our country, but the business of death, the lunacy of funerals, religious cults, Hollywood, and the space race.

The film follows Dennis Barlow (Robert Morse), a Brit who wins a trip to anywhere in the world. Of all places, he chooses Los Angeles, which, as Waugh and Richardson see it, is as an exaggeration of everything that is wrong with our country. In L.A., Barlow seeks out his Uncle Francis (John Gielgud), a soft-spoken and well-mannered gentleman who works for a major studio. But when Francis hangs himself after being fired by the studio, Barlow is left to clean up the mess and plan for his uncle’s funeral.

What ensues is not to be believed. With Liberace as the casket salesman, Rod Steiger as Mr. Joyboy, Jonathan Winters as the Blessed Reverend, and Anjanette Comer as embalmist Amy Thanatogenos (whose name, translated, means “to love death”), the film is at its best with the appearance of Joyboy’s mother, who personifies in her nonstop eating the overwhelming greed of Americans. Unforgettable. Grade: A-

Christopher Smith, a writer and critic who lives in Brewer, reviews movies each Monday in the NEWS.