The City of Your Final Destination: PG-13: brief sexual situation with partial nudity; 1:54; $ $ $  (out of $5)

 "The City of Your Final Destination” is not only the year’s most cumbersome title, but it’s also the first directorial effort from old-hand James Ivory without his late and obviously sorely missed producing and life partner, Ismail Merchant.

The on- and off-screen team developed such gems as “Howards End” and “The Remains of the Day,” both of which starred Anthony Hopkins. Now, with Ivory finally returning to work after almost five years of mourning for Merchant, the steady Hopkins again becomes one of his key players.

The always-grand Laura Linney co-stars here, playing the strong-minded widow of a one-hit novelist whose suicide left her high and not necessarily dry in the lazy-looking jungles of Uruguay. Oh, that writer also left behind a couple of others, including his mistress (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and the daughter she bore with him. An aging and somewhat manipulative brother (Hopkins) lives on the large family compound, too, with his younger and hard-working boyfriend (Hiroyuki Sanada, most recently Dogen, the temple-guarding leader of the Others, in TV’s “Lost”).

So, you can imagine that when a grant-pursuing grad student (Omar Metwally) arrives from America, wanting to write a biography about the dead and somewhat famous author, he almost has to convince a village to let him do it.

Based upon Peter Cameron’s 2002 novel of the same name, most of “City” makes sense in a sleepy sort of way and even offers a few polite laughs. There’s also much of the elegantly nuanced production quality for which Merchant-Ivory work has been noted during most of the past three decades.

Alas, some oddities — mostly in the way the film is edited — begin occurring about the time that Hopkins inexplicably wears a tiny bandage on his forehead during a nifty little drinking scene opposite Linney. First, the Band-Aid disappears as quickly as it came; then, so does Hopkins, for almost all of the final act.

A quick-fix ending doesn’t seem very well conceived, either, before a kind of addendum apparently does take a few of the characters to the city of their final destination. Some in the audience simply might be left scratching their heads over what really remains of a screenplay adapted by another usually strong Merchant-Ivory collaborator, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Read more by John M. Urbancich at http://jmuvies.blogspot.com/