Mark Reviews Movies: THE GOOD HOUSE

The Good House, Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 29, 2022

All is not well with Hildy Good (Sigourney Weaver), a real estate broker in an idyllic coastal town in Massachusetts, but she'd be the last person to admit as much. That's the premise of both the story and the main character of The Good House, which plays as a comedy about a person in complete denial about her life and assorted problems. That approach might have worked, except that, as hard as they may try, co-writers/co-directors Maya Forbes and Wally Wolodarsky haven't made a particularly funny movie.

The jokes simply don't work here, both because they simply aren't that funny and because this story quickly stops seeming like something at which we should be laughing. It's obvious that the filmmakers, adapting Ann Leary's novel, know this, if only because the third act starts taking the character and her predicaments very seriously—even though it features the most unintentionally amusing material in the whole movie. By that point, though, it's impossible to believe whatever sincerity Forbes and Wolodarsky are trying to push.

Weaver certainly isn't to blame for any of this. Her performance here clearly understands Hildy, her background, her assorted defense mechanisms, and her constant state of denial about having any kind of problem. Even as the screenplay (written by the directors and Thomas Bezucha) seems to go out of its way to keep Hildy at some distance from us, Weaver remains engaging in how precisely she overtly and subtly communicates the workings of this character.

The biggest distancing tactic—beyond the general distraction of a tone that's disparate from the underlying severity of the story—is that Hildy almost immediately becomes a fourth-wall-breaking narrator. She stares right at the camera as she lays out the basics of her personal life, her job, and her justifications for publicly appearing as one kind of person while hiding a big secret. The goal, obviously, is to directly connect Hildy to us, but it's such a disrupting and constant gimmick, in terms of both the mechanics and the irony-laced attitude of the narration, that it has the opposite effect.

Hildy's big secret is that she drinks. She used to drink a lot more, but her family—an ex-husband (played by David Rasche) who is now happily married to a man and her two daughters, Tess (Rebecca Henderson) and Emilly (Molly Brown)—and friends—including Wendy (Kathryn Erbe), who was Hildy's assistant at her real estate business but has since started up shop on her own and with Hildy's contacts—had an intervention. Hildy agreed to enter rehab, but since leaving there and with her personal and professional lives falling apart, she finds it funny that, unlike when she really drank, she now finds herself drinking alone.

That's the sad state of Hildy's addiction, and one has to get past the character's increasingly self-destructive and dangerous behavior, as well as an unaddressed childhood trauma, to see her situation as anything other than miserable and on the road toward some tragedy for herself or someone who has the misfortune of getting in her way. The filmmakers clearly see it, since so much of the story revolves around Hildy hiding her drinking from others, but they also want us to be amused by her daring. A couple of drunk-driving expeditions are played as freeing adventures, and Hildy's continued narration frames the lengths to which she goes to keep this secret in winks and sarcastic observations.

As for the rest of the story, it features an old romance renewed with Frank (Kevin Kline, whose dialect becomes a distraction, since no one else in the cast seems to bother with one), her high school sweetheart and local jack-of-all-trades contractor, and a new friend/drinking companion with Rebecca (Morena Baccarin), who's new to town and doesn't know about Hildy's past issues with alcohol. All of it, especially when Hildy discovers the unhappily married Rebecca is having an affair with local psychiatrist Peter (Rob Delaney), comes across as the screenwriters trying to deflect from the character study they appear too uncomfortable to make.

Erroneously, The Good House wants to be a comfortable movie, but even a slightly deeper look at this character and this scenario raises multiple discomforting issues. Obviously, the filmmakers finally get around to addressing them directly, but the ways in which they do it—with a mystery and a scare about a missing, possibly dead, child and an apparent turn to the supernatural—are so over-the-top that, at least, the movie gets some laughs—of disbelief, but laughs nonetheless.

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