THE MEDDLER is writer/director Lorene Scafaria semi-biographical movie about her widowed mother, who moved across the country to build a new life around her grown daughter. The mother, played marvelously by Susan Sarandon, is indeed a meddler but despite the comic title, THE MEDDLER is more than a simple comedy about a meddlesome mother but a warm dramedy that explores a mother-daughter relationship as the mother copes with her new life as a widow.
Left financially secure after the death of her beloved husband, Marnie Minervini (Sarandon) decides it is time for a change in her life. The change she picks is to be closer to her daughter – literally. Marnie moves from her longtime home in New Jersey to Los Angeles, where her unmarried daughter Lori (Rose Byrne) is a successful television producer. With a new iPhone, a condo in the Grove neighborhood and plenty of free time and money, bubbly mom Marnie devotes herself to her daughter – calling or texting her daughter several times a day, letting herself in to her house unannounced, befriending her friends, involving herself in her daughter’s love life and even offering to advise her daughter’s psychotherapist. Meanwhile, daughter Lori, nursing a broken heart after breaking up with her boyfriend, an actor named Jason (Jason Ritter), is quickly overwhelmed by her mother’s loving but too-constant presence.
Lori sees a chance to escape her mother’s smothering attention when work takes her to New York. She tells her mom she needs for her to stay behind to take care of her dogs. Actually, Marnie is not eager to go back East, where her in-laws, a loving but overwhelming Italian family, and some unresolved issues from her husband’s death await. Instead, Marnie fills her time with new meddling projects – offering to provide a regular ride for a clerk she met at the Apple store so he can go back to college, offering to pay for a wedding for one of Lori’s friends (although she cannot seem to quite remember the friend’s name), volunteering at a hospital and playing a movie extra after stumbling into a shoot accidentally. Her meddling wins her friends but Marnie is still not ready to just start a completely new life. When a couple of very different men (Michael McKean and J.K. Simmons) are attracted to her, she cannot get away fast enough.
Sarandon is completely wonderful in this role, a real showcase for her considerable skill. Like last year’s “I’ll See You In My Dreams,” it is a rare meaty role for an older actress in a film with a bittersweet story that addresses some real issues of aging. Bryne is terrific as well, walking the thin line between something verging on callousness towards her mother’s buried pain (and guilt over that), and an impulse to self-preservation from a smothering by well-meaning mother love. And still keeping both the comedy and truth in that.
With a deft touch, Scafaria mixes comedy and truth, in a film that is both apology to her mother and warm, affectionate portrait of an unsinkable optimist, in an honest if comic exploration of the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship. While the film is mostly funny, it has a serious side. Despite Marnie’s bubbly personality, she is coping with grief in her own way, which means immersing herself in other people’s lives to avoid issues in her own.
While Marnie cheerfully interjects herself into her daughter’s life, suggesting ways she could patch things up with her ex-boyfriend, she is less eager to embrace her own life. The reason under all the meddling that gives the film its sad undercurrent: the mother working through her grief after the death of her beloved husband, and the hole his loss has left in her life. The film is more about different styles of working through grief. A visit to her in-laws, a loud, affectionate Italian family, reveals that Marnie was also running away when she moved from New Jersey, avoiding subjects she does not want to deal with, even two years after her husband’s death. Likewise, Marnie recoils and retreats when faced with the possibility of new romance, still not ready to let go of her grieving and take a step towards new love. Meanwhile, J.K. Simmons is funny and warm as one of those potential love interests, a quirky retired cop with a chicken coop in his backyard.
Hilarious as well as heart-tugging, Scafaria wisely passes on making THE MEDDLER a straight-forward comedy and opts for a more difficult task – making a film that honestly confronts the pain and love in a mother-daughter relationship, one that tackles all the messiness of real feelings in a warm film that avoids false sentimentality. It is also one funny yet touching expression of love from a daughter to her mom.
THE MEDDLER opens on May 13th, 2016
OVERALL RATING: 4 1/2 OUT OF 5 STARS
