Summarize and humanize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in English
I’ll Be Right There (now streaming on Peacock) is a small-scale indie dramedy that doesn’t stray at all from formula. But it’s a good formula, because such films are often a showcase for strong performances, e.g., Edie Falco, here showing us the multitudes within a character who exerts so much energy meeting the needs of other people, she has no time to consider her own. Brendan Walsh (who worked with Falco while helming episodes of Nurse Jackie and Tommy) directs a script by Jim Beggarly that gives an array of terrific actors plenty of funny and poignant moments to execute – an array so talented, the true MVP of this movie might be the casting director.
The Gist: We meet Wanda (Falco) as she makes box lunches for people who don’t live with her and are adults who are perfectly capable of making their own damn lunches. We meet these lunch-eaters as Wanda careens from one encounter to the next: She heads to the doctor’s office to meet her mother Grace (Jeannie Berlin), who learns that she has leukemia, although with no symptoms, it may never affect her life, so why should she bother to quit smoking? Then Wanda is summoned to the ER by her daughter Sarah (Kayli Carter), who’s roughly 300 months pregnant and convinced something’s wrong with the baby because he hasn’t kicked in hours and hours, and just as Wanda plops down next to her in the waiting room, hey guess what, the baby kicks. And then Wanda’s late for her son Mark’s (Charlie Tahan) therapy session, where the therapist wants to corroborate Mark’s stories to find out if he’s been lying to him for six months – and he has, so the shrink drops him.
It’s mess after mess after mess that Wanda mops up. Just when you start to wonder if she makes a living as a cleaner for the mob or worse, a corporation (rimshot), we learn that she’s a freelance bookkeeper who spends her evenings piloting her so-plain-it’s-ugly ’90s station wagon from business to business balancing the paperwork. One of the business owners, Marshall (Michael Rapaport), is her beau, and she hasn’t dumped him despite her steamy affair with Sophie (Sepideh Moafi), because she’s worried he’s already in a depressive state after breaking his wrist and being unable to play sports (yes, please sigh deeply). And just as she’s waking up alongside Sophie, her ex-hubs Henry (Bradley Whitford) drops by with bad news – he doesn’t have the money to help pay for Sarah’s impending wedding to the baby’s daddy. It seems Henry’s had too many children with his current wife (it’s not hard to do the math and realize she’s a Younger Woman) and he’s unwilling to part with the beloved vintage convertible to help pay for anything, the beloved vintage convertible that might’ve been a catalyst for their divorce.
It’s increasingly clear that Wanda is an am-I-the-only-responsible-one-around-here exasperated person who might not know what to do with herself if she wasn’t being a taxi and putting out fires for her eccentric mother and recovering-addict son and very stressed-out daughter, and coddling her boyfriend and wondering why her secret girlfriend doesn’t invite her over to her house. In one revealing episode, she bumps into someone she barely doesn’t remember from high school, Albert (Michael Beach), and after about 90 seconds of conversation, offers to help this might-as-well-be-a-stranger bake confections for his daughter’s school event – a knee-jerk Mom Who Does Everything For Everyone Else move that illustrates her unconscious avoidance of her own needs and interests. Perhaps it’s worth noting that Albert is a fireman, since they seem to have that particular skill in common.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I’ll Be Right There is off-brand Nicole Holofcener (see: Enough Said, You Hurt My Feelings) – it’s just as good even if you don’t recognize the logo on the box. These movies typically come from writers, directors and actors with extensive background on television, and explore the lives of middle-aged adults with intelligence and poignancy.
Performance Worth Watching: Falco is as magnetic as ever, of course, but the film wouldn’t be as memorable without its ensemble – especially Whitford, Beach and Berlin, wily veterans who deliver insightful and funny characterizations in support.
Memorable Dialogue: Even when the script delivers obvious observations, it enlivens the moment with a crisp punchline:
Henry: Whatever they need, whenever they need it, whatever you’re doing, you drop it and you go and rescue them.
Wanda: That’s not true.
(pause)
(Wanda’s phone rings)
(Wanda sighs)
Sex and Skin: None really, beyond some postcoital snuggling.
Our Take: Advice: Ignore the contrived structure of I’ll Be Right There and focus on the performances, specifically on the delivery of the dialogue. That’s where you’ll find the substance of the film, with Falco as the anchor and the rest of the cast orbiting her like satellites. It’s a good way to get to know Wanda and how she ticks, since she defines herself by how she interacts with the important people in her life. In that sense, the movie’s tightly focused thematically in its illustration of a woman who gives and gives and gives and gives until there’s not much left of herself but a martyr complex.
How did she get here? I’ll hazard a guess: Motherly obligation, because the role demands common sense and caretaking skills, both of which she’s good at, so why not lean into it? And her self-imposed assertion that someone around here needs to have their shit together, even though everyone else is an adult capable of fending for themselves. Being a parent often means finding the balance between letting your children make mistakes so they can learn from them, and preventing them from making egregious mistakes that’ll indelibly alter their lives. Wanda’s kids are adults and her mother is elderly, and this is how she sees them: Daughter: knocked up. Son: forever on the brink of relapse. Mother: a smoker and a gambler (although they’re not mutually exclusive). They all feed into Wanda’s complex to a degree, although her mother is wise enough to resist it a little.
There’s a big fat ugly word for what Wanda needs to stop being: enabler. Her character is complicated by her curiously noncommittal romantic life, although that’s symptomatic of her unconscious need to put everyone else’s shit ahead of her own shit. The irony here is, as we watch Falco enliven all the knotty complications of this character, we begin wondering if she’ll ever have a moment of peace, and if she’ll set aside her own ego long enough to listen to those around her and realize that the conundrum is of her own making. There are moments here that are lightly poignant, and others that are truly laugh-out-loud funny, enough to make us overlook the overbaked contrivance of its climactic moment, which inevitably involves an inopportune water-breaking incident and a panicked trip to the hospital. But don’t judge I’ll Be Right There for its sitcommy dalliances, because it’s ultimately much smarter than that, and crisply observational in its depiction of a common, recognizable character type.
Our Call: We all likely know someone like Wanda, which makes I’ll Be Right There an enjoyable, intelligent character study. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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