Adam Rapp’s gift for concision, of paramount importance in the theater, has worked against him in his first attempt at film. In “Winter Passing,” out today, the playwright and novelist runs up against the problems that can befall a succinct and wellwritten play when it is transposed into a feature film.

“Winter Passing” is a study in the aftermath of tragedy on a gifted and complicated family dominated, like J.D. Salinger’s Glass family, by a suicide that hovers just outside and around the story. Reese Holden (Zooey Deschanel) returns from New York City to her family home in Michigan to search for a collection of her famous and literary parents’ love letters, left to her after her mother’s suicide. There she finds her father, Don Holden, played by Ed Harris, in a state of paranoid isolation and alcoholic decline. He is surrounded by a strange and wounded surrogate family composed of Shelley (Amelia Warner), a former student, and Corbit (Will Ferrell attempting a dramatic role), a general caretaker and former Christian rock musician. The reclusive author, the family’s surname, and the cluttered, bookish environs of the house itself, all place us in a Salingeresque world of genteel intellectual disarray, and the subsequent toll that both genius and tragedy take on a family. Mr. Rapp uses our familiarity with this family lexicon to quickly and efficaciously set up a spare, incisive play of four characters.

Mr. Rapp is an extremely gifted writer, the recipient of many prizes and much praise, a successful young adult novelist, and soon to be a published novelist. His prolificacy and versatility are admirable, as is his willingness to explore the advantages and limitations of different genres.

He establishes the complexity of the characters and tensions between them with such economy and efficiency that he is left with a lot of extra time to fill – whole scenes are created around a few lines of dialogue, people move from place to place unnecessarily – to the detriment of the film’s pacing. But while flashes of Mr. Rapp’s remarkable proficiency are visible throughout, it is apparent that he has not yet mastered the vocabulary of film. His direction is clumsy and slow, and dilutes unnecessarily the lucid kernels of tragedy. He has not yet acquired a mastery of the silent, visual language of film, an idiom capable of great expression with great economy. The implied realism of film, its representational nature, causes his searing insights on loss, pain, and the complications of family to appear excessive, overdone. It is a shame, because Mr. Rapp does possess a true lyrical genius, perfectly interpreted in this instance by Ms. Deschanel. Her unsentimental and engaging charm is the most remarkable feature of the film. Even when the story begins to falter, veering toward the cliched, she remains the cornerstone for the tone of the film, and a pleasure to watch.

From her first appearance, Ms. Deschanel quietly achieves a remarkable feat, that of making the all too familiar image of the self-destructive East Village artist-bartender seem genuine and real again. And her extremely expressive yet understated responses to simple moments of casual tragedy capture the true pathos of sincere grief.

Ms. Deschanel’s pitch-perfect restraint is somewhat countermanded throughout by Mr. Harris’s extravagant deterioration, though he does achieve a certain majesty in his sheer abjectness. And then there is Mr. Ferrell, who despite the patently obvious sincerity with which he applies himself to his role is nevertheless a casualty of his own previous comedic success. One simply cannot take Mr. Ferrell discussing karate (and pronouncing it KAraTAY) seriously.

“Winter Passing” possesses much the same graceful awkwardness as a classical dancer attempting to disco. It is possible that Mr. Rapp will find his stride in film as he has in so many other genres, and until such time, “Winter Passing” remains a moving, if flawed, first attempt.