For better or for worse, Denys Arcand’s international breakthrough Jesus of Montreal was an examination of the battling impulses inherent within all religious endeavor, a pre- “Mel’s-Passion” examination of piety clashing with creative self-interest. In it the performance of a passion play brings out the question of artificiality when conjuring images of the divine, and the fine line separating the “performance” from the evocation of the ethereal. Subsequent efforts, Love and Human Remains and Stardom, forthrightly declared themselves investigations of artificiality, respectively in post-sexual revolution “transgression” and in the fame game—characters in both bartered themselves for social status. In an attempt for uncompromising earnestness, Arcand seems to have learned nothing from his prior films. His latest, The Barbarian Invasions, is itself utterly artificial, a drippy piece of slapdash dross masquerading as enlightened parable that combines political vagueness and self-righteously noble sentiment. The regression seems complete once you realize he’s revisiting his earlier Decline of the American Empire, an all-night “bull” session from 1986 that displayed the battle of the sexes as a litany of miscommunications. Headliner Rémy Girard and a handful of other forgettable supporting players from the earlier film return here for further ruminating on the dissolving of a once-blissful intellectual collegiate utopia. Here, his stock characters who gather around the bed of Rémy Girard, now dying of cancer, all seem mere screenwriting whims, none of them emerge as living, breathing individuals. Every tactical device Arcand piles on feels overly lubricated in order to avoid the rusty squeaking of its hoary cliches (the doting wife, the sassy gay couple, the uptight professional, cell phone-wielding  professional son). Yet Arcand is savvy: by surrounding his conventions with a multitude of contemporary “themes” and “issues,” he has created a peripherally political thinkpiece sure to make its targeted liberal demographic giggle with pleasure and exit with a song in their hearts and a self congratulatory tear on their cheeks. Assisted suicide, lovable and easily reformable drug abusers, unapologetic atheism, anti-American punchlines scattered like sprinkles on an already overly decorated layer cake. All well and good—but so overly calculated to secure festival audience plaudits.

Rarely does the overt striving for delicacy result in such heavyhanded sermonizing; emblazoned on the film’s lapel is POIGNANCY. A retreat into a redemptive enclave of winkingly open-minded post-Marxist scamps, it’s nearly pristine in its high-minded tomfoolery. Simply put, relatively wealthy patriarch Rémy (Girard) is dying of cancer and wishes to reconcile with his distant (not estranged, really…) son Sébastien before he departs. Yet the endless procession of faces that surround his hospital bed extends to former university colleagues, a pair of mistresses, a clueless devoted wife, and a myriad of witty intellectuals never missing the opportunity for a crowd-pleasingly catty turn of phrase. Arcand’s most nefarious invention is ironically the film’s most successful characterization: Marie-Josée Croze as Nathalie, one of Rémy’s girlfriend’s daughters, heroin-addicted, bitter, and estranged. Nathalie brings with her a heroin survival kit for Rémy to face his final days without pain. “Soon you’ll be riding the dragon,” her eyes glisten as she feeds him his morphine substitute. Croze’s tremulous conflicted gaze expresses a world too full of experience for one so young—yet she’s merely a liberal device, ultimately easily redeemable. By the time our cuddly misanthrope/adorable philanderer reaches his impeccably woodsy summerhouse, and he and his friends are reminiscing about Marcuse and Fanon, the standard sitcom framing can no longer conceal the stench of the bigger fish the director has to fry up. Arcand’s agenda is nothing less than Bohemia’s Last Gasp.

With its socialist strain comes natural swipes at the American capitalist oppression, but if only these moments had been finessed a little more (witness Von Trier’s Dogville to see a more persuasive attack on long upheld North American values and hypocrisies). Rémy’s travel to the States for a CatScan is accompanied by an ear-splittingly bombastic rendition of “America the Beautiful.” Greater purpose? Who needs it when you have loud trumpets? And those mini-American flags decorating the foreground as Rémy enters the X-ray tunnel are just window dressing. The title itself in part refers to 9/11: yet only the most willful viewer could make that connection based on what's onscreen—Rémy’s constant bemoaning of a world falling into disrepair registers neither intellectually nor emotionally. The personal never meets the political, because Arcand can’t persuade us that any of this, however earnest, is consequential. The father-son dynamic reaches fever pitch, but it’s all so telegraphed that it can only elicit a nod of recognition.

What plagues Arcand’s film most of all—and so many films concerning cancer-ravaged main characters—is its depiction of the disease itself. Bypassing the poignant final breaths of Christopher Munch’s devastating Sleepy Time Gal and even the disruptively realistic depictions of the disintegrating body in Carl Franklin’s One True Thing, Barbarian Invasions ends up as warmed-over Terms of Endearment…or saints preserve us, Love Story. In that film, Ali McGraw’s designer death left her “preppy” boyfriend bereft and blankslated. Here, Rémy’s “preppy” offspring, following one perfectly timed final father-son bonding moment, ends up in about the same place. It’s the preppiness that Arcand seems to be criticizing that he ultimately validates—he attempts for the muted visual camaraderie of Eric Rohmer, and comes up with a J. Crew catalogue. —MICHAEL KORESKY

The Barbarian Invasions opens in New York and Los Angeles on November 21.