A Little Help (***3/4)

There’s a lot of things—murder and vampires, for example—that you see in movies way more than in real life. One of those is people changing. There’s even a term for it, character arc. But probably most people you know have their character pretty well arced by early adulthood; different events may confront them, but they stay kind of the same. That is true also of the characters in this movie, notably Jenna Fischer’s lead, and that’s what I liked about it. In the beginning of the movie, she’s a Long Island dental hygienist with a husband (Chris O’Donnell) who’s always working late, a pudgy, pre-teen son, and a somewhat passive disposition, especially relative to her mother and older sister. She smokes on the sly (and fibs to the kid) and drinks a bit too much beer. By the end the movie, she’s become a single mother, but she hasn’t changed much.

If you see this movie, you’ll kind of want her to change, or at least stop letting people tell her what to do.  I think some people won’t like the movie for that reason, or because it’s less of a comedy than it seems like from the poster, or from Fischer’s other roles (in NBC’s The Office, or the films Hall Pass and The Promotion). But this was for me the movie this year that most exceeded my expectations. The writer-director is Michael J. Weithorn, who has numerous TV credits as writer and producer on sitcoms going  back to the 1980s (notably Family Ties and, more recently, The King of Queens), but has never made a feature film. I can only assume that this story was much more personal than most of the television work. At any rate, the relationships and the characters seemed true to me, as, for example, when the topic of one sister being more attractive than the other comes up, which is something that must be much more of an issue in real life than in movies. Weithorn shows the family dynamic as composed of not so many peaks and valleys but a lot of smaller ups and downs; the one obvious tug-at-the heartstrings moment between mother and son is earned, and is by no means the only affecting moment.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/10/11