Early in the handsomely mounted but stodgy romantic drama “My Policeman,” an older woman looks out the window of a cottage in a seaside village in the 1990s and sees her taciturn husband ambling back to the house. Cue the needle drop to the 1955 Empires doo-wop tune “Magic Mirror” as we dissolve to an image of that same man some 40 years earlier on a much sunnier day along the water in Brighton, England. Why, it’s almost as if there was a time when things seemed brighter, and the world was filled with possibility!
This type of heavy-handed treatment runs throughout “My Policeman,” from songs such as “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” telling us when someone is well, you know, to the sprinkling of obvious visual clues in the production design, to the disappointingly thin and rote main characters, played by two different trios of actors in the alternating time periods. Despite the big-name allure of Harry Styles, the presence of such reliable veteran actors as Gina McKee and Rupert Everett, and the prestige-pedigree source material of a 2012 novel by Bethan Roberts that was inspired by the decades-long real-life relationship between the famed British novelist E.M. Forster and a policeman, this is a borderline dull affair.
