Move on, not much happening

Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy, Patricia Clarkson, Honor Kneafsey, James Lance. Much reading between the lines, just to draw a blank IN a smallish British seaside hamlet in the 1950s, a tallish British widow in her 40s opens a bookshop.

Some of the locals are supportive of the venture. Others are dead against it.

Customer traffic and sales levels fluctuate as tensions ebb and flow.

This, ladies and gentlemen, covers the tiny patch of narrative territory to be traversed by The Bookshop, a shy, retiring and rather dozy adaptation of the 1978 novel of the same name by Penelope Fitzgerald.

Unless you have been feverishly scanning cinema guides for the past 40 years to check if a movie version of the novel has been made, there is no need to rush to check out this snoozer.

Florence Green (Emily Mortimer) is an aspiring trader of tomes who hits the coastal village of Hardborough hellbent on vending volumes at anyone of reading age.

There is something faintly sad about Florence that probably has something to do with all the hazy flashbacks we get of her late husband. He loved the printed page as much as she does, and oh, she does miss him so.

Her choice of a decrepit landmark known to all as “The Old House” gets right up the nose of snooty socialite Violet Gamart (Patricia Clarkson). This busy-body had plans for the site, and now she’s roused a rabble of locals to hassle poor Florence around the clock.

Exactly why The Bookshop takes almost two hours to stitch together this threadbare tale is not so much a mystery as it is a miscalculation.

Writer-director Isabel Coixet has instructed her cast to underplay their roles to the point where their dialogue seems almost coded.