The Meddler

The busybody in the offbeat comedy/drama The Meddler can’t help but stick her nose in everyone else’s affairs. If she minds her own business for too long, the loneliness of her own life may swallow her up whole. (The monotonous spin of the ceiling fan above a bed provides an apt metaphor for this woman’s true state of mind.) Freshly widowed and flush with 401k cash, sixtysomething Brooklynite Marnie Minervini (Sarandon) relocates to the perpetually sunny shopper’s paradise of Los Angeles to be near her chronically depressed only child Lori (Byrne), a relatively successful television writer struggling to put a broken relationship behind her. Initially, the film focuses its dysfunctional gaze on their Terms of Endearment-ish mother-daughter relationship. The well-meaning but nosy Marnie can’t help but dispense an endless stream of unsolicited advice and inappropriately insert herself in Lori’s social and romantic life – in her unthinking mind, that’s a parent’s job. (The running joke in The Meddler is that everyone but Lori wishes Marnie were his or her mom.) Hilariously – and scarily – she crosses the line in a big way when she books sessions with Lori’s stone-faced therapist, not for the purpose of coping with her own grief but rather to elicit private details her daughter refuses to share with her. It’s an acerbically funny moment in the movie – that is, until the psychoanalyst turns the tables and spells out the reasons for the meddlesome mother’s insatiable need to be needed, as if you were incapable of arriving at such conclusions yourself. In a film that otherwise prides itself on the subtlety of its anecdotal narrative and character development, the diagnosis is jolting, and about as welcome as some of the unsought counsel that streams from Marnie’s mouth.

The parent-child tension in The Meddler muddles a bit when Lori temporarily departs for New York City to shoot a sitcom, and a higher-than-a-kite Marnie (don’t ask) spends a platonic evening with a retired police officer partial to other kinds of mother hens (a relaxed Simmons at his most charming). By the culmination of this increasingly quirky film (case in point: a scene in which Marnie savors the pleasures of a freshly cooked egg), the focus has shifted to its titular character’s gradual acclimation to single life, though the film’s most satisfying moment comes near the end when mother and daughter bond over a pregnancy scare like only a mother and daughter could. Not surprisingly, Sarandon dominates the movie (she’s in every scene), giving a generous performance, even when her New Yawk accent fails her. Roles like this are regrettably rare for actresses of a certain age, and Sarandon makes the very best of this opportunity. She may be once again playing someone’s mom here, but this time, she’s center-stage and ready to please like only a mother can.