Available for home viewing: "The Lovers"

If all middle-aged marrieds were having as much sex as Mary and Michael (Debra Winger and Tracy Letts in The Lovers, then the ratings for NCIS would go into a tailspin. Yet the extracurricular bonking that they gingerly enjoy — she with a needy writer (Aidan Gillen) and he with a neurotic ballet dancer (Melora Walters) — appears to bring only marginally more pleasure than their sclerotic union.

Sadly, that’s only one problem with this over-determined, fussily managed romance. Falling with a thud between two stools, it has neither the zip nor the zaniness of farce nor the airy vivacity of the best romantic comedies. The sugary, violin-heavy score that elbows its way into virtually every scene might beg to differ, but its cudgeling chords can’t force enchantment when, improbably, Mary and Michael’s jaded passions are rekindled.

That would require a screenplay (by the director, Azazel Jacobs) with sparkle and energy instead of one that takes forever to nudge characters from staring to kissing. No one suffers more from this programmatic approach than Winger, whose warm, loamy sexiness demands roaming privileges. Only watch her in The Sheltering Sky, playing a dissatisfied wife who finds her true self in the middle of the desert. She’s the beating heart of that movie, turning what could have been a sterile exercise in alienation and ennui into something vibrantly human.

Which brings me to a third stool that Jacobs (who also directed and helped to write the smart, adorably prickly HBO series Doll & Em) could have claimed. Beneath its mushy music, The Lovers nurses something altogether more sour and more fruitful: a self-sabotaging desperation that you can sense Winger straining to vocalize. It isn’t love that Mary and Michael are seeking; what really turns them on is sneaking around.