“THE GOOD HOUSE” My rating: B– (In theaters)
114 minutes | MPAA rating: R
“The Good House” is a prime example of cinematic bait and switch…you get sucked into thinking it’s one kind of movie and along the way it becomes something quite different.
That’s the sort of thing that might alienate moviegoers. Except that “The Good House” features Sigourney Weaver in one of her more seductive performances. Who says there are no good roles for women of a certain age?
Weaver plays Hildy Good, a divorced grandmother with her own residential real estate biz in a picturesque seaside New England burg where her family roots go back 300 years (she has descended from one of the Salem witches).
Almost immediately the screenplay (by Thomas Bezucha, Wallace Wolodarsky and director Maya Forbes) lets us in on Hildy’s inner life. While her work requires her to exhibit a gift for schmoozing, our leading lady is in fact a font of sharp-tongued snarkiness who often speaks directly to the audience to diss and dish dirt on her fellow citizens.
Hildy’s outward show of bon homie and civic uprightness and her inner sarcasm provides much of the flim;s dramatic juice. Sardonicism on this level is bracing; when it comes from an older woman it’s damn near celebratory. Not to mention laugh-out-loud funny.
A good chunk of “The Good House” is devoted to a character study of Hildy as she copes with her struggling business (a former assistant has broken away and is now beating Hildy at her own game), a long-ago high school squeeze (Kevin Kline) who over decades has become a blue-collar millionaire (he’s a scuzzy-looking coot who owns a fleet of snow plows, garbage trucks and home renovation vans) and her children and grandchildren.
The film’s real subject sort of sneaks its way in. Hildy, you see, likes her wine. She tells herself (and those of us watching) that she’s totally in control of her intake and that the hand-wringing of her family and friends is just so much do-gooder excess.
Basically “The God House” is about her gradual realization that she’s a first-class alcoholic. At that point the film isn’t so amusing any more.
Now this hardly breaks new cinematic ground; the film works because Weaver is so entertaining and because the ranks of her fellow townspeople have been filled with the likes of Morena Baccarin, Rob Delaney, Kathryn Erbe, Beverly D’Angelo and David Rasche.
All that talent helps compensate for some narrative choices that smack of cheap melodrama. The late-in-life romance with Kline’s character works well enough, but some other subplots involving a neighbor’s autistic child and an extramarital affair being conducted by the local psychiatrist feel underdeveloped and superfluous.
The further the film strays from its central theme — a woman coming to grips with the lies she’s been telling herself — the less effective it becomes.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 