'The Good House' Highlights Sigourney Weaver's Greatness [TIFF Review]

We casually throw the word “icon” around with such abandon these days that it almost feels like we need a new, more potent idiom to describe those who actually fit the bill. But until we get that term, let’s say that Sigourney Weaver is an absolute icon and leave it at that — a brilliant actor equally adept at drama, action, and comedy, a three-time Academy Award nominee (two of them in the same year), the kind of screen presence who lifts just about anything she’s in. But it’s been a good long while since she’s had a role worthy of her talents since even the best of scribes rarely know how to write a Woman of a Certain Age.

She gets such a role in “The Good House,” Maya Forbes and Wallace Wolodarsky’s adaptation of Ann Leary’s novel, and she’s so good — so present, so credible, so complicated —that we’re perhaps overly forgiving of the film’s flaws. She stars as Hildy Good, a real estate agent (so yes, the title is a terrible bit of winking wordplay) in the charming little village of Wendover, Massachusetts. “I’m the top broker on the North Shore,” she says, “or at least I was.”

Hildy’s going through a rough patch. Her husband (David Rasche) left her (for a man), her protégé (Kathryn Erbe) started her own business (and stole all her clients), sales are slow, and 18 months back, her two adult daughters staged an intervention over her drinking. “So I let them send me away,” she shrugs. “All I could think was it was too bad the girls never met my mother because then they’d know what a real alcoholic looks like.”

“I need a good year,” she sighs, and “The Good House” follows her through that year, good and bad. She’s cheerfully falling off the wagon, and her daughters are impossible, but there are moments when she feels like she’s getting her mojo back. Many of them come when she’s in the company of Frank Getchell, a scraggly old townie contractor, and a Good Guy. Kevin Kline plays him — also a versatile actor, similarly underused these days. And it’s an earthy, lived-in performance that conveys the rich, complicated backstory of these two characters (“There was a time in my life when I was quite in love with Frankie Getchel,” she confesses, “and you would’ve been too”). Weaver and Kline previously co-starred in “Dave” and “The Ice Storm,” and that sense of shared history helps here; it feels like there’s genuine affection between them and a real sense of something reigniting.

Forbes and Wolodarsky fill out the ensemble with wonderful character actors — besides Kline, Erbe, and Rasche, there are brief but juicy roles for Paul Guilfoyle, Beverly D’Angelo, and Rob Delaney, among others. Morena Baccarin also turns up as a former client who becomes a friend and drinking buddy, and she’s excellent, vulnerable, and warm; watch the slightly embarrassed and utterly charming way she reacts when Hildy gently calls her out for her extramarital affair.

But it’s Weaver’s show, and she relishes the opportunity. A fair amount of her dialogue, particularly exposition, is delivered straight to the camera (showing a particularly gorgeous home to clients, she muses, “They can’t afford it, they know it and I know it”), and that device, as always, is risky. But it works; Weaver has a way of talking into the lens like it’s a confidante, and she’s sharing a secret. The screenplay (which Forbes and Wolodarsky adapted with Thomas Bezucha) leaves her playing some pretty pat beats in the second half and does the best she can with them — she’s genuine, even when the things she’s saying are second-hand.

Some of the directorial choices are dubious. There are a few too many vanilla pop oldies on the soundtrack, and the filmmakers seem so worried about making a dry, talky drama that they end up flinging their camera around so much, it calls attention to itself. But the biggest issue here is that of tone. Their previous collaborations, “Infinitely Polar Bear” and “The Polka King,” deftly intermingled comedy and drama, and for long stretches, particularly in its first hour or so, “The Good House” does the same, zigging when you think it will zag, carefully sidestepping the most obvious conflicts and complications (and the easiest solutions).

But films about abuse and recovery require a bottoming-out, so when Hildy gets it together (in twinkly montages, of course), we know she’s going to fall apart eventually, and she does so in rather too dramatic fashion. The big turns of the last half hour seem jarringly atonal, replacing the modest character-driven comedy/drama we’ve been enjoying with big tragedies and cliché-ridden pronouncements and carefully prepared payoffs. It’s not enough to derail what has been, until then, a fine little film. But they cut it a little too close. [B-]

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