A Slipping-Down Life may be low-key, but if you enter its unique atmosphere, you will leave exhilarated.

The movie is not a great dramatic statement, but you know that from the modesty of the title. It is about movement in emotional waters that had long been still. Taylor makes it work because she quietly suggests that when Evie's life has stalled, something drastic was needed to shock her back into action, and the carving worked as well as anything.

Taylor is utterly believable even when the screenplay (from an Anne Tyler novel) is too self-consciously quirky, and Pearce nicely portrays the guy she obsesses over.

The casting of Taylor gives the film a powerful center, a bright light that keeps it on course.

While the movie is content to be merely atmospheric, the performances convince you that here are two misfits who might be a perfect fit.

Although mood often substitutes for momentum in Ms. Kalem's film, both of her stars give affecting performances, and there's growth on both sides of the unlikely romance.

Struggles valiantly to keep its head above whimsy, and though the movie finally succumbs to an excess of heartwarming, it's a promising college try from a first-time writer-director.

A Slipping-Down Life has a worn, scruffy feeling. It gazes lovingly at vintage clothes and battered old cars as if they were the visible signs of authenticity, wishing that its morose, disconnected inhabitants could somehow be touched with the same elusive quality.

Mostly, by story's end, we're just glad they and their unfortunate clothing are out of our sight for good.

Has an oddness and whimsicality about it that can, at first, be confused for authenticity.

As it plays, it simply feels like a kind of cop-out. Nobody changes that much.

The plot contrivances in which the story is ultimately sewn include the death of a father, an unexpected pregnancy, the sale of a house and the rest of the rigmarole that bad writers are prone to drag in at the last moment. It's too bad, because these characters deserved a better story.

Taylor does that thing she does when she whispers as if she has just discovered speech; Pearce enjoys himself doing his own singing, and embracing grunge.

A curiously bland drama that fails to fulfill the promise of its early scenes.