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“Once Upon a Time in the Midlands” Sony Pictures Classics Directed by Shane Meadows

“Once Upon a Time in the Midlands” is a film with a bit of an identity crisis.

Like “The Full Monty,” it features the struggles of working class British folk trying to make the most out of their dreary lives. Like Guy Ritchie films “Snatch” and “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” it has bumbling criminals who speak in accents almost incomprehensible to an American audience. But “Midlands” also wants to be a character-driven drama about relationships, and though it doesn’t quite succeed, it does paint a sweet portrait of what it means to be a family.

Rhys Ivans (Hugh Grant’s hilarious roommate in “Notting Hill”) plays Dek, a sad sack who lives with Shirley (Shirley Henderson) and her daughter, Marlene (Finn Atkins). The film opens with Dek proposing on national television and Shirley turning him down. Her ex Jimmy (Robert Carlyle) sees the show and decides he wants Shirley back, despite having walked out on his family three years earlier. There is the slight complication of Jimmy having stiffed his partners out of their share in a recent robbery, but this subplot doesn’t really go anywhere.

The film ultimately comes down to the question of who Shirley will pick – Dek, the loyal, if slightly boring guy, who’s a great father to her daughter, or Jimmy, the sexy but unpredictable drifter who has the advantage of being Marlene’s real father. She makes what we assume is the right choice, which leads to a nice montage of the family ice skating to the strains of Sarah Mclachlan’s “Adia” (haven’t heard that one in a while).

The actors in the film do a nice job, especially the versatile Ivans, and Atkins, who shows extraordinary promise as a child actor. The cast makes the most out of a script that seems more fit for a TV movie than the big screen, but the characters’ determination to make the best of their lives makes this a sweet, although somewhat disappointing, film.

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