TRUTH may be stranger than fiction but it’s seldom more entertaining, especially when projected onto a big screen at 24 frames per second.

This is an epic love story based on the life of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Burmese political activist, who lived under house arrest for more than 15 years during the time her National League for Democracy party triumphed in national elections.

She was under guard when her husband lost his battle against prostate cancer and in November 2010, when finally released, Kyi hadn’t seen her children for 10 years.

The people closest to her were interviewed and the script crafted over the course of three years for this fascinating tale of one woman’s brave stand against Burma’s military junta.

Unfortunately, documented fact doesn’t lend itself particularly well to exhilarating cinema. Kyi’s enforced isolation from acolytes and the media results in repetitive scenes of lead actress Michelle Yeoh shedding tears in close-up as the national heroine makes telephone calls to learn the fate of her loved ones.

For long periods, there is no physical contact between Yeoh and David Thewlis as Kyi’s ferociously loyal husband, starving the central romance of oxygen and threatening to extinguish on-screen chemistry.

A prologue set in 1947 Rangoon documents the death of Kyi’s father, nationalist leader Gen Aung San, during negotiations to form a new government. By 1998, Kyi is a housewife living in Oxford with her husband Michael, a university lecturer in Tibetan and Himalayan studies, and their two children.

When news reaches Kyi about the ailing health of her mother, she flies to Burma and becomes embroiled in the national uprising. “Not all historians get to be a part of history in the making. You must enjoy your ringside seat,” a colleague tells Michael as his wife opts to stay in Burma and spearhead the pro-democracy movement.

In retaliation, the Burmese government denies Michael and the boys visas, hoping that Kyi will leave the country. But Kyi has unwavering resolve. The film is an overlong dramatisation of a page from history, which tugs our heartstrings under a pedestrian direction.

Yeoh and Thewlis deliver rousing performances but the accompanying film-making is uninspired, peppered with cryptic musings on the human condition: “A saint is only a sinner that keeps on trying.”

The screenwriter and the lead actors keep on trying but their efforts amount to little more than a chocolate box re-imagining of Kyi’s selfless and idealistic crusade.