The horse, which will eventually sprout gauzy digital wings and soar over the Brooklyn Bridge, provides assistance to Peter Lake, an artisanal thief in early-20th-century New York who has untameable hair and the scruffy leprechaun charm of Colin Farrell. Peter also shows up, with a different coif, in 2014 Manhattan, where he finds a box of significant junk in a secret hiding place in Grand Central Terminal and befriends a newspaper reporter played by Jennifer Connelly. But that is much later. First he must evade the clutches of his former boss, Pearly Soames (Russell Crowe), and fall in love with a consumptive, wealthy redhead named Beverly. Downton Abbey fans will recognize her as Jessica Brown Findlay, who played the cruelly killed and widely mourned Lady Sybil.

She is dying in this one, too. That is hardly a spoiler, since her introductory voice-over has a beyond-the-grave quality, and she is lighted with the glow of poetic martyrdom. But Goldsman, making his directing debut, suppresses the morbid and even the merely sad implications of the story in favour of wide-eyed, mystical wonder. There are swooping aerial shots, buckets of orchestral goo and much talk of destiny, miracles and angels.

“What if we get to become stars?” Findlay breathlessly wonders, meaning not the kind she is already well on the way to becoming, but rather the gaseous, faraway kind that we glimpse in the night sky.

Of course, we don’t get to do that, and it takes more than the literalisation of a metaphor to make it fly. A thin line separates the magical from the preposterous, and by insisting so strenuously on its own magic, Winter’s Tale pitches helplessly into earnest ridiculousness. Its old New York is a lustrous and sparkling place, but one from which the texture of actual life has been almost entirely scrubbed away. Instead of storybook charm, it has the overworked, too-perfect grandiosity of a corporate theme park.

The modern city, where much of the second part of the movie takes place, is a slightly more interesting environment, partly because of the way the almost forgotten traces of its previous incarnation lie just under the surface. And Farrell has a livelier connection in a few scenes with Connelly than he does in all of his moony-eyed, slack-jawed moments of romantic communion with Findlay. The story, meanwhile, jettisons the digressions and subplots that are the pith of the novel (along with Helprin’s calorie-rich prose) and settles into a standard movie-fantasy battle between good and evil. Crowe’s character is not merely a criminal, but also a demon, and, as such, enlisted in a centuries-long campaign against love, hope and happiness. Peter is an unwitting conscript in that war, the rules of which keep changing. Sometimes a fellow in a hat is an angel; sometimes demons are forbidden from travelling north of the Bronx.

The combat is duller than what you might find in a Percy Jackson film, partly because the movie ostentatiously prefers its murky themes to any kind of action-movie thrills. This is pretension masquerading as good taste, and Winter’s Tale is so obsessed with announcing how beautiful and wonderful it is that it forgets to be any fun.