It was an Oscar nominated foreign-language film and a hit on the West End in London, but Elling proves well nigh insufferable in its Broadway incarnation. Playwright Simon Bent’s adaptation of the Norwegian novels by Ingvar Ambjornsen and the subsequent acclaimed movie proves itself to be a throwback to such dated 1960’s era films as “King of Hearts” in its depiction of mental illness as a compendium of comic quirks.

Denis O’Hare and Brendan Fraser play the central roles of Elling and Kjell Bjarne, two residents of a mental asylum who are released and set up in a pristine Oslo apartment to make their own way in the world. Under the supervision of social worker Frank (Jeremy Shamos), they learn to experience life and love while developing a strong bond in the process.

Obsessive/compulsive Elling is the far more intellectual of the duo; he describes his institutionalization as having accepted an offer from the government to supply a place for “people who are in a hectic phase in their lives.” The overgrown man/child Kjell is a forty-year-old virgin who obsesses about food and sex and who has a recurring problem with his uncontrollable erections.

The play depicts their burgeoning relationships with each other and with such figures who enter their lives as Reidun (Jennifer Coolidge), a pregnant upstairs neighbor with whom Kjell falls hopelessly in love, and Alfons (Richard Easton), an elderly poet who helps Elling channel his artistic impulses.

The play’s humor derives from the main characters’ respective peculiarities. Giving his roommate a gift of a miniature house made out of matchsticks, Kjell proclaims, “If you don’t like it I’ll kill myself.” He nearly passes out from pleasure while eating his first slice of home-delivery pizza, and becomes obsessed with phone sex lines. Elling transforms himself into the “Sauerkraut Poet,” inserting his verse into packets of sauerkraut at random supermarkets.

Under the uninspired direction of Doug Hughes, it’s all too cutesy by far, and despite the especially game performances by O’Hare and Fraser (the latter looking far different from his buff days as “George of the Jungle”) the evening meanders to the point of inconsequentiality.

Coolidge is, as usual, hysterically funny in her multiple roles, especially in her brief turn as a pretentious poet who delivers a sample of her works that were written “while sick with malaria in Cambodia.” Easton offers study support as Elling’s mentor and Shamos is winning as the beleaguered social worker. But their efforts are ultimately defeated by the evening’s witless triviality.

Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47^th St. 212-239-6200. www.Telecharge.com.