Whatever intrigues, insights and darkly comic charms writer-director Savi Gabizon gave audiences for his oddball Israeli dramedy “Longing” are mostly lost in translation in a Richard Gere remake he filmed in Canada.

A tale of a middle-aged man who learns he had a son, and that he just died, and who experiences grief, regret and a “Longing” to have known the 19 year old, longing that warps from awkward into something increasingly bizarre, it just doesn’t play among those indulgent and ever-so-polite Canadians.

Gere, for all the soulful brooding his career’s had him play, seems miscast and a little lost as a “father” who imposes on the good folks of Hamilton, Ontario (filmed in and around Hamilton, Cambridge and Kitchener), takes liberties and crosses lines with people who, sooner or later, are going to have to tell him “ENOUGH!”

Suzanne Clément of “Death of a Ladies Man” plays Rachel, an old lover who visits Daniel Bloch (Gere) in New York. Their meeting sets the tone for the film to follow. It’s awkward, with pointless bickering over the mere “45 minutes” he could “give her today” when he had much more time tomorrow.

Not that she even needs 45 minutes. They split up 20 years ago, and she returned to Canada. She didn’t tell him she was pregnant when she moved, because “I knew you didn’t want children.” They have a son, Allen, 19. He’s amazing. Well, actually, he’s dead. I’ve got to go.

It’s a decently-performed scene, but leaden — ironically and gratingly wordy. Awkwardness about this situation is the rule. As Gere’s Daniel somberly broods, when she ducks out of the dining room, calls his lawyer.

“Longing,” from this point on, proclaims its sadness, but reaches for this quirky undercurrent of dark comedy. As Daniel flies north for a funeral that, oddly, only he attends (not the ex, her husband, Allen’s friends or classmates), a mystery unfolds.

Was he into drugs? Someone calling himself Allen’s “best friend” comes asking for money for a deal that went sour with Allen’s “accident.”

The kid was obsessed with his French teacher, writing her poems, expelled from school for stalking her and painting a sexually explicit poem on the wall of their school. Daniel meets the teacher, who is played by Diane Kruger, so he gets and we “get it.” But did she lead the boy on?

Asking some stranger you’ve just met something like that just isn’t done. Not in Canada, or anywhere. Well, maybe Israel.

As Daniel meets this girl passing herself off as Allen’s “girlfriend” and that father still mourning a dead daughter in the cemetery, his visit is extended, his investment in this son (Tomaso Sanelli) he never knew grows and he dreams about conversations with a pianist teen who “kept to himself,” who hadn’t lived with his family in years to try to fill in the blanks.

While the film has unusual and intriguing elements that have turned up in other movies about someone who died young and unmarried, Gabizon’s close-to-the-original remake simply does translate to this setting.

Despite the long run time and extensive dialogue, questions are unanswered, themes are left hanging. The conversations are instead overloaded with explanations of that which doesn’t need explaining, added exposition and social niceties that amount to speaking when simple visuals and the situation should do all the talking.

The casting serves up promising possibilities, but Gabizon’s whole point is to upend expecations. One can imagine — or stream the Israeli version of the “Longing” — to see how universal the mixed emotions stirred up here might be, and how Israelis might react to the increasingly strange directions the father-who-never-was wanders towards, and how Israelis might react to every affront, liberty taken or rude question posed in a time of mourning.

Not as indulgently as your average Canadian, I dare say. Perhaps comic points Gabizon was making about cultural stereotypes got lost in this adaptation.

Kruger’s teacher is guarded and wounded, and Clément’s mother is brittle and also not telling us the “full story,” and both get to showcase the limits of their characters’ indulgence.

But Gere’s Daniel gives off passive, reflective vibes even when he’s imposing himself on the teacher’s class, gently threatening the school to return Allen to their enlistment rolls and class graduation picture or arguing with the troubled family that took Allen in.

And by the time we figure we have permission to laugh at the truly bizarre turn things take in the third act, we’ve already lost any “longing” we had to see this drab misfire through.

Rating: R (profanity, Some Sexual Content, Nudity

Cast: Richard Gere, Diane Kruger, Suzanne Clément and Tomaso Sanelli

Credits: Scripted and directed by Savi Gabizon, based on his Israeli film of the same name. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:51