Festival Central - Sundance Film Festival

The first feature to receive financing from the Cayman Islands-based Aramid Entertainment, writer-helmer Sharon Maguire's good-looking, convincingly tactile adaptation of Chris Cleave's controversial novel begins with the voiceover of a young working-class mother (Williams) addressing Osama bin Laden. "London is a city built on the wreckage of itself, Osama," she intones. "It's had more comebacks than the Evil Dead. It's been flattened by storms and flooded out and rotted with plague. Londoners just took a deep breath and put the kettle on ... "

Williams makes the young woman fairly hardy and stoic herself, qualities that become an irresistible lure to the two new men in her life: Jasper Black (McGregor), a slightly sleazy journalist with whom she is having sex when her husband and son are killed in a bomb blast at a stadium; and Terrence Butcher (Matthew Macfadyen), the police officer investigating the terrorist attack.

That the young woman's late husband was a member of the bomb squad is a coincidence that helps explain some story points, but others seem too convenient.

One of these is the woman's discovery of the son (Usman Khokhar) of one of the suspected bombers; they forge a friendship that's a bit too much to swallow. Terrence's sense of culpability for the bombing, Jasper's hovering presence and their contempt for one another make for a distracting subtext. But it's Williams' movie, and while she makes the most of the part, it's also too much to sell effectively.

The stadium bombing itself is frighteningly real; not so Williams' mad, stumbling entrance into an arena from which literally shell-shocked people are moving the other way. "Have you seen a little boy?" she pleads, but it's more painful than true, and almost as unconvincing as some of the dialogue. "I will find each piece of your heart that's been blown to smithereens and I will put it back together again," Terrence tells her. Yikes. She'd be better off in the stadium, the bombing of which occasionally seems like a device to get her back in the dating game.

Cleave's novel was published July 7, 2005, the day of the terrorist attacks on London's public transit system ; ads for the book were hanging in the tube when the bombs went off. Similarly, the timing of the film's premiere at Sundance wasn't particularly auspicious, corresponding as it did with the death of actor Heath Ledger, the father of Williams' child. Current events certainly add to the poignancy of the performance, and morbid curiosity might even fill the coffers. But they don't make the movie any more successful dramatically.

Production values are excellent.

Camera (color), Ben Davis; editor, Valerio Bonelli; production designer, Kave Quinn; music, Shigeru Umebayashi; costume designer, Stephanie Collie; makeup, Christine Allsopp. Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival (Premieres), Jan. 26, 2008. Running time: 96 MIN.