This man isn’t worth thinking about

Starring Amy McAllister and Samuel James. Directed by Alan Hruska.

Unrated. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 38 minutes

Bottom line: Tedious, dry romantic comedy

By David Lewis

San Francisco Chronicle

“The Man on Her Mind,” a belabored, un-whimsical romantic comedy, is a case study of what can go wrong when adapting a stage play into a movie. Except for the last five minutes or so, this film doesn’t have a cinematic bone in its body.

The premise has promise: Nellie is having an imaginary affair with her fantasy version of Leonard, whom Nellie dated briefly but avoids at all costs. Conveniently enough, Leonard has a fantasy lover who is his version of the ideal Nellie.

Contrived as all this is, there’s comic potential here, but director Alan Hruska cannot escape the confines of the stage play that he wrote. He sits his characters down in rooms and has them talk for what seems an eternity. It would be one thing if they had anything remotely interesting to say, but these shrill, uninteresting people are unable to engage in anything that vaguely resembles human interactions.

The cast (from the original play in London) seems to be channeling the Woody Allen vision of the neurotic New Yorker, but we don’t buy it for a New York minute.

This is a project that desperately needed to be opened up. It also needed some imaginative cinematography, but the camera barely moves during the film. The dull shots only add to the tedium that mounts with every frame, and we feel trapped, hoping our imaginations will take us somewhere else.