In one of the best scenes in , a character reveals a family story involving an improbable getaway driver. Taking in this tale is her middle-aged daughter, who knows a thing or two about driving — although her role behind the wheel is more along the lines of schlepping to and fro than making a break for it. These two strong women are played, respectively, by and , actors of ineffable down-to-earth zing.
When, later in the movie, the screen fills with a slo-mo shot of them running side by side down a hospital corridor, it feels like a winking, loving gift, one of the giddy dividends from this wry take on family and midlife anxieties. Set and shot in a Northeastern hamlet (Pearl River, in New York’s Rockland County), director Brendan Walsh’s second feature (after ) is a modestly scaled affair that benefits from its unfussy sense of place and its superb casting. navigates a territory between comforting and thorny —much as its central character, Falco’s Wanda, weary of being the voice of reason in the midst of a whole lotta drama, balances reasonable exasperation and deep wells of patience while tending to one family member in distress after another.
Wanda is the divorced mother of two sort-of grown-up kids. Daughter Sarah (Kayli Carter) is eight months pregnant and has her heart set on a church wedding, before her due date, to Eugene (Jack Mulhern), an even-keeled fellow as easygoing as she is given to hysteria. Wanda’s floundering son, Mark (Charlie Tahan of , who wi.