Joe (Jake Gyllenhaal) has, as they say, a lot on his plate. As Moonlight Mile begins, he’s dressing for his fiancee’s funeral, in her parents’ home on Boston’s North Shore. Jo (Susan Sarandon) and Ben (Dustin Hoffman) are very nice, and they have a lovely, doting dog named Nixon. Still, and understandably, the mood is somber and tense. After the reception, they “dish” and so relax, sharing frustrations with all the pathetic small talk (“Are you enjoying our town?”) and unhelpful observations (“You must be exhausted, all of you”).

Jo receives a pile of self-help books from these well-wishers, one titled These Things Happen, but the truth is, these particular things don't happen very often: Diana was shot in an ice cream parlor, hit by a bullet meant for the killer's estranged wife. Loss is hard any time, but the suddenness and violence of Diana's death, not to mention the lingering duress of the trial, make this "thing" especially difficult. Such details also make Brad Silberling's movie fit a little too neatly with the recent popularity of media grieving and death rituals (In the Bedroom, The Son's Room, Six Feet Under). This despite (or maybe because of) the fact that it's based on Silberling's own experience, the murder of his fiancee, Rebecca Schaeffer, star of My Sister Sam, shot by a deranged fan outside her apartment in 1989. It's a grim story, and the press coverage of Moonlight Mile is milking it for all it's worth.

The film itself initially "deals with" unspeakable tragedy in imagery and language that are considerably less mawkish than Silberling's City of Angels (1998). As Ben, Jo and Joe try to get on with their lives, they handle their horror, anger and despair very differently. Jo, a writer, finds herself unable even to imagine writing; she burns the self-help books in an effort to stave off the "cliche parade," wears her bathrobe and drinks tea. Her elaborate, noisy disarray bothers Ben, who maintains self-control by focusing his energies on work, namely commercial real estate. He's buying up a street's worth of lots in order to build a mall (this being 1973, malls look both odious and promising, in the way that "plastics" did back when Hoffman played Benjamin Braddock). "I'm great in a crisis," he says. "You always need one of me around." He convinces forlorn-feeling Joe to join in the venture, such that the kid is (weirdly) fulfilling a commitment he made to Diana to partner with her father after the wedding.

Joe wants to please Ben, or thinks he does, mostly for lack of a specific way out of it. But soon he starts dreading the future he's falling into, out of an inability to move, a combination of depression and sympathy. At night, sleeping in Diana's room, he dreams of her ghost coming to visit him; to escape, he starts sneaking out at night (and it's not a little creepy, if practical, that he's staying in her room).

If Joe's resistance to his Ben-associated fate occurred only in this unplanned, vaguely juvenile way, you might go along. Walking the streets at night, visiting local establishments, he looks appropriately anxious and bewildered. But then the film provides him a too-convenient savior, in Bertie (Ellen Pompeo), the local postmistress who is herself wound up in loss and denial, concerning a boyfriend missing in Vietnam for several years. She looks after MIA's bar (which has a jukebox, providing poignant '70s tracks over which she and Joe can bond). She doesn't want to sell the bar to Ben, and Joe's defense of her decision not to sell runs him into thorny conflict with his would-have-been father-in-law. Property here stands in for memory, loss and overwhelming desire, a metaphor the film underlines unnecessarily.

Jo, so sensible, spirited and generous (and so crisply played by Sarandon), is yet brought low by her heartache, sometimes more visibly than others, and always apparently surprised by her vulnerability. When she learns that Joe has been sneaking out to see Bertie, Jo is momentarily undone, but speaks her piece straight-up, confessing that she has trouble with "this next part, you with another girl."

Moonlight Mile also has trouble with this part, as it stumbles toward its efficient resolution, where everyone can come away feeling better.

The primary means for this trajectory -- aside from the Joe-Bertie hook-up -- concerns the prosecution of Diana's murderer, the one plot element that proceeds inexorably, if not exactly forward, then at least in motion.

Meetings with the A.D.A. prosecuting Diana's case, Mona Camp (Holly Hunter), are brusque and not a little strange: she wants to seek the death penalty, and tends to fix each of the three mourners with a piercing look, underlining that they must all show up each day, to bring Diana "to life" in the courtroom with earnest displays of their "feelings." That the three mourners are unsure of their feelings doesn't seem to faze her. Unfortunately, Mona's strategy comes back to haunt everyone, when, late in the film, Joe has his own mini-breakdown while on the stand, pledging to honor Diana's memory by "telling the truth." It's to his credit that the unfussy Gyllenhaal makes even this soapy contrivance mostly bearable.