Sigourney Weaver brings a level of prestige to any project she appears in, and she’s by far the best part of The Good House, a comedy-drama that stretches for a redemptive arc at the expense of actually telling an engaging story. Drawing inspiration from the fourth-wall breaks of the television series Fleabag and House of Cards, Weaver connects directly with the audience at choice moments of self-delusion and confession, and it’s at these times that the film feels like it realizes its potential as a cinematic adaptation of the popular novel by Ann Leary. But for much of the rest of its runtime, The Good House, co-directed by Maya Forbes and Wallace Wolodarsky, is a pale shadow of its source material, a rote visualization of a story better suited to the page than to the screen.
Hildy Good (Weaver) is a canny realtor in a New England town, whose outward indicators of success―the clothes, the car, the breezy confidence―mask her steadily diminishing successes. A former protégé (Kathryn Erbe) is poaching her clients, and the lease payments on her Land Rover are overdue. But Hildy’s biggest problem comes out of an uncorked bottle, and she’s a connoisseur of rationalizations which all boil down to the insistence that “wine is not really drinking.” When her family and friends stage an intervention, she can’t stop cracking jokes about needing a drink to get through the event.
The script by Thomas Bezucha and the co-directors takes its time getting to the revelation of Hildy’s problem, which creates an issue with tone. The quaint setting and Weaver’s prickly humor establish the breezy vibe of a low-stakes comedy, making the icky nature of her alcoholism feel like a hard left turn into gloom. There’s a lot of implied backstory about what a terrible mother she was, but she seems genuinely shocked to learn that her adult daughters harbor any resentment. In the absence of flashbacks or more exploration of Hildy’s apparent history of neglect, the viewer is left to wonder whose side of the story to believe. When she overhears someone refer to her as a drunk, she reacts as if she just got slapped in the face. There are surely many nuances in the gap between her self-image and the boozy reality, but not much of that makes it to the screen where her behavior is sometimes sloppy but never abusive. Is she just, as she insists, misunderstood?
The one promising aspect of Hildy’s downward trajectory is her relationship with an old flame, Frank (Kevin Kline). We haven’t seen nearly enough of Kline in recent years, and his appearance here is initially a delight. In his heyday of the mid-’90s, Kline was an actor who wielded the charisma and comic chops of Cary Grant in his prime, and he flexes a bit of that charm here when he’s allowed to play a bit with his character, a successful handyman with a down-to-earth demeanor and a salty New England accent. He and Hildy have a tumultuous history, and he’s clearly wary of getting involved with her again. Despite these misgivings, he’s patient, clear-headed and supportive, which turns out to be somewhat of a problem, as it quickly becomes clear that his character is conceived more as a life preserver than a man. There’s no tension around whether the rekindled relationship will work out for Hildy, because Frank is an infallible saint in a flannel shirt, always ready and willing to help Hildy clean up her messes. The thinness of his character saps Kline’s ability to do much with it beyond a few quips and puppy dog eyes.
All of this makes for a shaky foundation to build a story on. There is no plot arc aside from the issue of Hildy’s struggles with drinking, some of which are starkly depressing. The details of her booze-related deceptions are smartly observed, such as her sneaky method of spiking a virgin Bloody Mary while checking on something in the kitchen, or her hyper-awareness of having left empty bottles where her daughter might find the evidence. Weaver shows great range in her swings between snappy wit and ashen-faced hangover, but the stakes feel limited. There’s some business about real estate shenanigans, and a red herring about a missing child that briefly throws Hildy into a panic about what might have happened when she was blackout drunk, but these are treated as peripheral episodes in her steady stumble towards gaining some control over her life and appetites. It might be inspirational, and it’s surely a common story, but it doesn’t make for much of a movie.
Photo courtesy of Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions
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