103 min | R | September 30, 2022 | Roadside Attractions
Hildy Good sells houses, gossips about her neighbors, and pours a second glass of wine the second nobody is watching. She descends from a Salem witch and treats every secret in town as inventory. The wine is the one thing she cannot sell anyone, least of all herself.
Hildy Good sells real estate in a coastal Massachusetts town where everyone knows her business and she knows theirs. She descends from a woman hanged as a witch in Salem, and she works the lineage as a parlor trick to charm clients. Her family stages an intervention and ships her off to rehab. She comes home and drinks again, alone, certain she has it under control. The film is about the story an alcoholic tells herself and the neighbors who find it easier to believe than to confront.
Sigourney Weaver plays Hildy as a woman who has weaponized charm. She turns to the camera and lets the audience in on jokes she would never share with the people in the room. Weaver makes the denial legible without ever letting Hildy admit it. Kevin Kline plays Frank Getchell, the rumpled local contractor who knew Hildy decades ago and never stopped. Kline underplays everything, and the comfort between him and Weaver does more work than the script gives them. Morena Baccarin plays Rebecca McAllister, a wealthy newcomer whose own affair hands Hildy a crisis to manage instead of her own.
Maya Forbes and Wallace Wolodarsky direct from a script they wrote with Thomas Bezucha, adapting Ann Leary’s novel. They build the whole film around Weaver’s direct address, and the device cuts both ways. The editing repeatedly leaves the room before Hildy’s drinking turns ugly, mirroring the gaps in her own memory. That structural choice is the smartest thing the movie does and also its biggest cheat. By looking away when Hildy looks away, the film protects her from the consequences the material keeps promising.
The Good House wants to be a wry coastal comedy about a charming local fixture and a hard portrait of an addict lying to everyone she loves. The two ambitions pull against each other, and the film keeps choosing comfort. Weaver holds the contradiction together by sheer force of presence. She finds the panic under the wit and the loneliness under the performance. The movie flinches at the moments that should land hardest, and a sharper version would have trusted her to take the fall.