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Trailer for "Boynton Beach Club"

It isn’t a hopeful sign when the song behind the credits and into the opening shots of Boynton Beach Bereavement Club is a Sinatra imitator singing “Love and Marriage.” Like this music, the characters and situations in Susan Seidelman’s movie are kind of musty, secondhand and slack.

Not because it’s about the life adjustments, romantic and otherwise, of widowed or divorced 60- to 70-year-olds living in a retirement community in Florida. It’s mostly because Seidelman and her mother Florence (whose idea the movie was) have taken a soft-focused, sentimentalized approach to their material. There’s a sense that they’ve tried to include a representative selection of “typical” problems from a survey of the subject.

In fact, they fashioned the script after interviewing Florence’s friends and neighbors in an actual Florida colony of “active adults,” using their stories to shape the movie.

I don’t doubt that what’s on the screen in some fashion reflects the lives of these people or that there are people who will recognize their own problems and situations in this stuff and be gratified by this recognition. But this amounts to something less than great fun. The movie is sort of sweet and has moments of tempered amusement. But it doesn’t seem either quite real or imaginative. Everybody is just so…nice.

There’s Marilyn (Brenda Vaccaro) whose husband is struck down by a car driven by Anita (Renee Taylor in a piquant cameo) early in the movie. She meets Lois (Dyan Cannon), a go-getter who tries to bring the sheltered, resentful widow out of her funk.

Then there is the still-grieving Jack (Len Cariou), who is lured to a meeting of the local “bereavement club,” where he meets the adventurous Harry (Joe Bologna) and is pursued by the frank and outgoing Sandra (Sally Kellerman). And so forth.

All of these people are fundamentally and reliably good and their fears and foibles never really call this assessment into question. The results are merely uninventive, like the movie equivalent of “easy listening.”

It’s certainly good to have these fine performers back, and especially together, but Seidelman hasn’t given them much opportunity to show why they’re so well regarded. There’s a paucity of dramatic and comedic tension. (Cannon, whose age in this is something of a mystery, looks truly, strangely “mahvelous,” as Billy Crystal used to say in his SNL Fernando Lamas persona. She’s seemingly a marvel of modern engineering and chemistry, and virtually wraith-like in her slimness. She must have spent more on the uncanny results than a Saudi royal family scion drops during an outing at one of Monaco’s casinos. But then, Cary Grant paid a pretty penny or two on exiting their marriage 40 years ago.)

The Seidelmans’ intention may have been to show that members of an older demographic still have lives to lead, and life in them to do it, but what they came up with is more cutely inspirational than sharply entertaining.