Susan Sarandon, Rose Byrne
“THE MEDDLER” My rating: C+
100 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
“The Meddler” is selling itself as one kind of cliche, when actually it’s a cliche of a different kind.
Marnie (Susan Sarandon) is a recent widow who has moved from her lifelong home of NYC to be with her screenwriter daughter
Lori (Rose Byrne) in sunny L.A.
TheBrooklynese-speaking Marnie is the sort of doting/smothering mama who shows up unexpectedly, lets herself into her daughter’s home with the key that is supposed to be used only for emergencies, and dispenses unwanted advice about how Lori might deal with the breakup of her own long relationship.
Okay, we’ve seen this comedy before. Pushy mom, resisting child.
Except that “The Meddler,” written and directed by Lorene Scafaria (“Seeking a Friend for the End of the World”), isn’t that movie at all.
When Lori leaves Los Angeles for a long location shoot, Marnie is left to her own devices and…and now we’ve got a drama about a widow exploring the options for the rest of her life.
That’s right, a drama. “The Meddler” is only nominally a comedy, if that.
Without Lori to fixate on, Marnie picks other targets. She befriends the Apple Store clerk (Jerrod Carmichael) who trains her to use her new iPhone; before long she’s talked him into enrolling at a local college and is even driving him back and forth to class.
Susan Sarandon, J.K. Simmons
She volunteers at a hospital where she zeroes in on an elderly lady in the throes of dementia.
She gloms onto Lori’s friend Jillian (“SNL’s” Cecily Strong) and offers to pay for her wedding.
And she begins seeing — in a very tentative way — a retired cop (J.K. Simmons) who now provides security for movie locations. He rides a Harley, lives in Topanga Canyon and raises chickens. In other words, Mr. Wonderful.
As a fan of both Sarandon and Simmons, I found some pleasure in watching their cautious courtship. And Scafaria has attracted some solid performers (Jason Ritter, Michael McKean, Casey Wilson, Harry Hamlin, Laura San Giacomo) for what are essentially walk-on roles.
But the pleasures here are borderline guilty ones. “The Meddler” drags out the well-worn tropes of the classic “woman’s picture,” and while it’s handled with a light touch, there’s no getting past the feeling that we’ve seen it all before.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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