The hardships and colossal tragedy dealt to two Irish families in the 1930s are applied like a treacly salve to their woeful American descendants in This Is My Father, a heartfelt but wrongheaded attempt to frame the past in pop-psychological terms. The Quinn brothers—actor Aidan, cinematographer Declan, and writer-director Paul—reportedly based their disappointing collaboration on old ancestral stories, but they rely too much on the past to explain everything in the present. One large knot in the family tree is enough to account for the '90s problems of a sad-sack Chicago schoolteacher (James Caan), his unruly teenage nephew (Jacob Tierney), and his stroke-addled mother. In a clunky framing story, Caan drags Tierney to rural Ireland in search of his roots and, through flashbacks of the stare-off-into-space variety, is told about his parents' doomed romance. Aidan Quinn gives a richly inflected performance as his melancholic father, a penniless orphaned farmer who falls in love with Moya Farrelly, the privileged young daughter of the wealthiest family in town. Their differences in age and class, along with the stifling moral doctrine of the Catholic church, lead their passionate relationship inexorably to tragedy. When it stays in 1939, This Is My Father is an affecting, if predictable, Irish take on the Romeo And Juliet model, deepened by powerful religious overtones. But nearly half the film is spent addressing Caan's tedious healing process, as he sulks and sighs over pints of Guinness and solemnly reconciles with faded gravestones. It's an obvious point that people's lives are informed by family history, but the Quinns place theirs too neatly, suggesting the far greater influence of the family business.