'The Song of Names' is a Holocaust-adjacent drama that's too sedate to pack a punch

Like a mournful tune on the world’s saddest violin, “The Song of Names” is sometimes beautiful, but so uniformly downbeat that a viewer may feel like switching to something else.

The movie starts in 1951 London, as a 23-year-old violin sensation is about to take the stage for his international debut. That’s Dovidl Rapoport (Jonah Hower-King), a Polish-born Jew who was raised in London during the war. When Dovidl is a no-show at his own concert, it’s a blow to Gilbert (Stanley Townsend), the music producer who took Dovidl in, and Gilbert’s son, Martin (Gerran Howell), who grew up with Dovidl as an adopted brother.

Cut to 1986, and Martin (now played by Tim Roth) is living in London with his wife, Helen (Catherine McCormack), and judging a music competition in Newcastle. That’s where Martin sees something remarkable: A teen violinist kissing his rosin pad for luck before performing. It’s a move Martin remembers Dovidl doing when he played. Martin starts asking the kid about the move — and begins following a trail of breadcrumbs in hopes of finding Dovidl, whom he hasn’t seen since before that cancelled concert 35 years earlier.

It’s a trail that takes Martin to Warsaw and New York, and through flashbacks that span from 1939 to 1951, and another set of actors — Luke Doyle as Dovidl and Misha Handley as Martin — to play the leads as pre-teens. The flashbacks show how Dovidl and Martin slowly became friends, and how Dovidl’s happiness as a budding violin prodigy was tempered with memories of his family, presumably caught in the unspeakable (or, at least, not spoken about directly in this movie) horrors of the Holocaust.

Director François Girard has explored the intersection of music and history before, in “The Red Violin” (1998) and the masterful “Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould” (1993). Here, though, Girard is stymied by a mystery plot — adapted by Jeffrey Caine (“The Constant Gardener”) from Norman Lebrecht’s novel — that takes a long and dispiriting road before coming to an unsatisfying solution.

That solution also leaves the film’s main actors, Roth and Clive Owen, with little to work with in what should be a dramatic conclusion. There’s lots of talk, about death and legacy, but nothing that either actor can make a genuine connection. In the end, “The Song of Names” is too timid to deliver the gut-punch such a topic deserves.

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‘The Song of Names’

★★

Opened December 25, 2019, in select cities. Opens Friday, January 24, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for some strong language, brief sexual material, thematic elements, and smoking. Running time: 113 minutes.