The Meddler

Synopsis: A New Jersey widow ,Marnie Minervini (Susan Sarandon), follows her screenwriter daughter, Lori (Rose Byrne), to Los Angeles in hopes of starting a new life after her husband's death.

The Meddler is one of those films that will appeal to audiences that match its characters, which is to say, mothers and daughters, but even then it will be because of the indulgence that they will bring to it rather than because of its intrinsic merits.

It does have one strong card and that is Susan Sarandon’s stand-out performance as the meddler of the film’s title. She doesn’t play Marnie as a caricatural over-bearing mother but rather a woman adrift, her compulsive chatter a compensation and cover-up for her inability to deal with life since the death of her much-loved husband.

This much writer-director Lorene Scafaria (no doubt drawing on her own experience) gets right but in general her film is too conventional in form, too obviously designed to please its audience to offer more than a passable diversion. What starts off as reasonably droll portrait of the anxiously yammering Marnie has little distance to go with what is essentially a single character premise.  Byrne in familiar mode as her hapless daughter drops out of the film for long stretches and the other characters are thinly drawn creations in contrived set-ups. In the most obvious of these, Marnie arranges a wedding on a luxury yacht for one of Lori’s friends (Cecily Strong) who, it turns out, is a lesbian. A novel twist you might say but whilst the lesbian friend looks like a glamorous straight woman, her spouse, inexplicably, is a typical-looking dyke and even more incongruously doesn’t have a single line of dialogue with which to establish herself. The conclusion is that she has been drummed up as a lazy pass at authenticity. Similarly Lori’s periodically-appearing ex-boyfriend (Jason Ritter) barely has more than a couple of lines and makes no contribution to proceedings whatsoever.

A good script would have made much mileage out of the awkwardness of its set-ups but Scafaria does little to make them work. Instead she gives us a counselling session in which an attractive (all the people in this film, with the exception of the token dyke, look attractive as are all the settings well-furnished) psychologist (played by Amy Landecker), explains Marnie’s hang-ups when they are already perfectly obvious to us and indeed to Marnie herself. Even more disappointingly, despite the film's title, Marnie is not a meddler but rather a unbelievably (in both senses of the word) helpful person. Scafaria does not appear to have registered the difference (one of Marnie's projects, a young black man she meets in an Apple store, simply evaporates as a storyline).

By the time that we get to Marnie’s hesitant relationship with a sweet-natured chicken-keeping divorcee, (J.K. Simmons) we are starting to approach let-me-out-of-here territory. Not a bad course of action unless you want to hang around for a mawkish reunion between a hospitalized mother and her adult son enabled by Marnie or the  resolution between the latter and her daughter via a self-test pregnancy kit. But then, I’m a bloke and this film wasn’t made for me.

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