In tones soft and sincere

Generations have celebrated the winter solstice -- the shortest day of the year -- because they understood that each day that followed would mean longer hours of sunlight to warm their climates, nourish their harvests and sustain life.

For first-time feature filmmaker Josh Sternfeld, 32, this annual event provides the metaphor for the emotional state of the characters in his new film “Winter Solstice,” which opened Friday in Los Angeles. It follows a father and his two sons “coming out of the grief of the past and having the courage to face the future” after the untimely death of the family’s matriarch.

Jim Winters, a father and widower (Anthony LaPaglia), is struggling against his inability to adequately communicate his feelings to his sons, who are maturing quickly and moving beyond their father’s grasp.

His elder son, Gabe (Aaron Stanford), announces the snap decision to move to another state, while younger son, Pete (Mark Webber), is barely getting through high school. Winters wobbles in the difficult role of sole parent, trying to find the delicate balance between telling his kids what to do and nurturing their choices. And when a new woman (Allison Janney) comes into his life, he must confront his own deeply buried need for the companionship of a woman.

Writer-director Sternfeld says he “became obsessed with this idea of a family of men without a feminine presence and what that might do to the emotional communication of the three guys ... how would they be able to express themselves to each other and show love and support for each other.” He also wanted to show the “feminine power” and “the vitality that women bring to men’s lives, but I wanted to do it with its absence and not with its presence.”

LaPaglia, 46, a Tony- and Emmy-winning stage, screen and television actor (currently in his third season of “Without a Trace”), was attracted to the sparseness of the script, which he says “was more about what was between the lines than what was on the page.”

As the father of a 2-year-old daughter, LaPaglia won’t have to deal with a father-son struggle. But the script “resonated” nonetheless for LaPaglia, who recalled his own father’s shadow looming large. The actor says his father “is a particularly strong character, has his own presence, and as a kid I always felt that presence. But there comes a time when you have to say, ‘I’m gonna do what I want to do,’ and I related to that very much [in the script]. And I think a lot of guys relate to that, especially if they come from kind of old-school families -- you know, working class, blue collar or families where the major focus was the parents want their kids to have a better life than the life they had.”

LaPaglia’s father, Eddie, emigrated from Italy to start a new life in Australia (where LaPaglia was born, and over the phone for this interview the son’s slight Aussie accent is still detectable). Eddie began as an automobile mechanic and now owns a successful car dealership.

“He wanted his kids to have an education, and therefore he had certain aspirations for us that we may not have had for ourselves,” LaPaglia says with a laugh. “And you know, because of that, there just came a moment in my life where I had to kind of stiffen up and say, ‘You know what, I appreciate what you want, but it’s not what I want, and I gotta go my own way.’ It happens a lot. It happens a lot, especially between fathers and sons.”

Sternfeld didn’t experience that battle with his own father, who is an associate professor at Columbia University, but says his father did instill “a real work ethic” in him. The filmmaker elaborates, “He showed me the importance of hard work and dedication and the importance of following your dreams, and that dreams cost something -- there is no fulfillment without sacrifice. That was definitely something I learned just by watching him live, that there’s nothing worth having that comes easy.”

In “Winter Solstice,” Winters works as a landscaper in suburban New Jersey -- two details that sprang from Sternfeld’s past growing up in the Garden State and working as a landscaper in upstate New York as a young man. It’s a profession that Sternfeld still feels is “very peaceful and dignified.”

LaPaglia, who is also one of the film’s executive producers, says that his character’s job was something that drew him into the script. “It’s at the same time very physical, and also it’s a very gentle occupation.”

Sternfeld found landscaping to represent the perfect metaphor for Winters, a character who is “able to take care of everybody’s house but his own, which I think is something that is very sort of endemic to the human heart.” He laughs. “You know, we’re all so good at solving everyone’s problems ... but rarely are we as good about making ourselves feel good.”

American family dramas of the 1970s and early 1980s, such as “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Tender Mercies,” “Ordinary People,” “Rocky” and “Five Easy Pieces,” were on Sternfeld’s mind throughout the process of writing the script and during production. They’re all films he connected with because of their “visceral, emotional immediacy to characters.”

But will today’s audiences -- used to fast-paced, bang-’em-up flicks -- be ready or willing to sit through a slower-paced film like “Winter Solstice,” in which the moments of revelation and change are minute but ultimately significant?

“Regardless of the pace, I think that audiences will connect with it because I think people want to see stories of real sincerity. I think people want to see movies about people that really make them think of themselves in every way, not just in the commercially convenient ways,” says the filmmaker.

LaPaglia adds, “We’re bombarded with visual images, audio, everything, and this movie is the complete antithesis to that -- it’s like taking a vacation in the country. You get to go to the theater and sit back and just let the movie wash over you, if that’s what you want. And I hope people enjoy that experience if they can. Some people have said, ‘Not a lot happens,’ and I go, ‘Well, depends on how you look at it.’ ”

In the early days of his film career, LaPaglia was pigeonholed in a series of Mafioso-type roles, but now he’s known more for his ability to exude a rare and commanding mix of vulnerability and strength in films such as “Lantana” and “The Guys.”

In “Winter Solstice” he continues to convey those qualities, but does tapping into all that emotion (both bottled up and expressed) come with a long-term effect that’s hard to slough off at the end of the day?

LaPaglia gives quick assurance that he doesn’t take his character’s baggage home with him. “I always say that acting is the world’s cheapest therapy. You get paid to actually work your problems out on screen, and that’s kinda how I treat it. Acting somehow allows me to kind of go to the places and experience things on film that I might not do in life, in fact I often don’t do in life.”