Who’s to say for certain what causes North Star to feel the way it feels. Maybe it’s the trite messaging around grief and family (with not one, but two, wistfully remembered dead dads), maybe it’s the odd little animated sequences, or maybe it’s just the way Scarlett Johannson’s British accent is reminiscent of child star Lindsay Lohan’s vocal work in The Parent Trap. But something about North Star feels vaguely and consistently like the hybrid of a Disney Channel Original and a Hallmark movie.
North Star is partially based on director-star Kristin Scott Thomas’ own childhood, in which her father and stepfather, both military men, died in a relatively close space of time, leaving her mother twice-widowed. In North Star, three now-adult sisters — Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson), Victoria (Sienna Miller), and Georgina (Emily Beecham) — return home to the British countryside to attend their twice-widowed mother’s third marriage.
In one of the many majorly patriotic, pro-military nods in the film, Rebecca, our pseudo-protagonist, is a high-ranking member of the Royal Navy. Rebecca is played with little finesse by Johansson, whose melancholy gazes around her childhood home are literally sketched in by strange, penciled animations of her youth — an aesthetic addition that distracts more than it emotionally evokes. She yearns for her lost parent while neglecting her own spouse and child through her workaholism, accidentally repeating her own childhood trauma in a slightly different manner.
The middle sister, Victoria, is an uber-rich and out-of-touch movie star with daddy issues that are reflected in her dating life. The youngest half-sister, Georgina, is an exhausted and underpaid nurse, married to an unfathomably, impossibly douchey man. North Star sketches out these very different lives as an explanation for their dynamic: they aren’t as close as they once were, but they also still love each other. It’s about as bland as a setup can be.
This blandness — these soft edges that offer no real conflict — is the curse of North Star as a whole. When the film creates conflict (which comes in small, easily resolved bursts instead of any natural arc), it must construct an issue, often out of thin air. It’s a film that’s sort of about sisterhood, sort of about aging, sort of about love, sort of about parenthood, and sort of about grief, and yet it doesn’t say anything beyond greeting card-level thoughts about each notion.
This isn’t to say that North Star was meant to be a grim melodrama. The film feels like it’s trying to be ultimately light, streaming-style fun. In search of levity, North Star occasionally pivots to sex comedy-esque gags that entirely lack finesse. Someone sees someone else’s boobs when they shouldn’t, someone’s dating a rich old guy who comes in on a helicopter, the sisters’ mother is marrying a man with the ridiculously campy last name of “Loveglove.” Perhaps most worthy of an eye-roll is a side plot about a cheating husband whose wife is not so offended by his perennial cheating but by the fact that said cheating also includes pegging. It’s all sex jokes for the uptight and easily squeamish, the same way all of the film’s emotional notes are for people not in the mood to feel all that much.
Not quite funny and never all that moving, North Star is light fare that seems so aware of its lightness that it forgets to ever take its own creation seriously. It’s a film that’s bogged down by all-too-tidy storylines and ideas and performances that are half-hearted at best.
