Books mean a lot to Ismail Merchant, the producing half of the filmmaking team Merchant-Ivory, which made Howard's End and Remains Of The Day while also serving as a pejorative term for mild, inoffensive costume dramas with inflated literary cachet. In The Mystic Masseur, his latest solo directing venture after 1999's moribund Cotton Mary, Merchant's camera drinks in hardcovers like expensive décor, dissolving from bookshelf to bookshelf at the Oxford library and noting every shipment of books by the pound. He even has the hero, a would-be author in the Trinidad countryside, ride a bike with books piled up on the front and back end, as if he's speed-reading in transit. The trouble with all this fetishization, both here and in Merchant-Ivory films in general, is that it places too much value on the page and not enough on the dynamics of another medium. Based on V.S. Naipaul's first novel, The Mystic Masseur shows more signs of life than Cotton Mary, but it's still a producer's movie: attractively mounted, dramatically inert. Merchant squeezes the passion and irony out of Naipaul's semi-autobiographical story, a bittersweet comedy-drama about an aspiring writer's unlikely sojourn into colonial politics and Hindu spiritualism. Set the early to mid-'40s, when Trinidad was still under British control, the film stars Aasif Mandvi as an irrepressible schoolteacher and intellectual who retreats to his ancestral island village with the absurd dream to one day "stand at the center of world literature." Encouraged by the other villagers, including his new wife (Ayesha Dharker) and opportunistic father-in-law (a scene-stealing Om Puri), Mandvi holes up in his modest home and spends months on a thin volume (A Hundred And One Questions And Answers On The Hindu Religion) that doesn't sell. In desperate need of money, he reluctantly takes up his father's old business as a healer and gains instant success around the island as The Mystic Masseur, fame he parlays into best-selling books and a momentous rise in local politics. Mandvi's life has an epic comic sweep, with plenty of potentially fascinating intersections with island culture, Hindu mysticism, and colonial intrigue. But Merchant trudges through his story as if he were making a standard biopic of a man who never existed, compressing the events together without dramatic emphasis or emotional continuity. Too often, he seems afraid of conflict, so much so that he winds up making an impassioned character seem helpless and ineffectual, left to twist in the historical winds. In the spirit of faithfulness to the source, Merchant keeps Naipaul's narrator and alter-ego (Jimi Mistry), a character whose only apparent purpose is to look inspired enough by Mandvi's crazed ambition to become a famous author himself one day. The decision to leave such a writerly device in a filmed adaptation is typical of Merchant, who naturally favors literaryrespectability over dramatic invention.