The Good House

Ms. Weaver makes this role seem effortless. I totally related to her character.

I have to search diligently these days, to occasionally find a gem of a movie, and this one is one of those special few.

The acting, the story, the characters, the setting, the score,the camera work....everything, was authentic, beautifully and excellently executed.

The only tiny thought I had, which did not lesson my enjoyment, was why they didn't go with a more authentic Maine accent. No big deal.

A must see movie for those of us who are not entertained or much impressed with what is most popular of movie making these days.

It's a drama set in a modern-day fictional town called Wendover, Massachusetts. It follows a somewhat functioning alcoholic 60ish realtor as she faces the reality of her declining business and family relationships.

Hildy Good (Sigourney Weaver) is a woman in denial about her drinking and its impact on her life after she's gone through one rehab. She still has a decent relationship with her ex, Scott (David Rasche), who left her for a man. Her daughters, Tess (Rebecca Henderson) and Emily (Molly Brown) have a more strained relationship with Hildy because of their childhood memories of her drinking.

Hildy also engages with a young married woman, Rebecca (Morena Baccarin), who is having an affair with the town's psychiatrist, Peter Newbold (Rob Delaney). Finally, as Hildy's world begins to crumble, she reconnects with Frank (Kevin Kline), her high school love, who is now the town's provider of garbage collection, substantial renovations, as well as fishing for lobsters.

This is Sigourney Weaver's movie. She is outstanding and has a good script with which to work. She is smart, clever, and humerous in dealing with her denial and frequently talks to the movie audience to explain herself. Kevin Kline is a good match. The rest of the characters are more forgettable as individuals but add texture to the context. Unfortunately, I thought the ending was too facile, detracting from the film's impact. I haven't read the book, so I don't know if the finishes match.

The Good House (2021) was co-written and co-directed by Maya Forbes and Wallace Wolodarsky.

Sigourney Weaver stars as high-profile realtor Hildy Good. Weaver is perfect for this role. She looks and acts like the person for whom the role was written.

In an interesting twist, Sigourney doesn't just play the part. She also confides to the audience watching the film. This has been done before, but I've never seen it done as well. (You could consider Shakespeare's soliloquies in the same light. However, most actors I've seen do soliloquies appear to be talking to themselves. Sigourney Weaver is definitely talking to us.)

Hildy is a top-notch realtor, but it's a tough, dog-eat-dog world, and she is holding her own, but not thriving. One problem is that she's an alcoholic. Not a sleep-it-off-and-have-a-hangover alcoholic. She's an alcoholic who drives while drunk, and who has blackouts that are scary.

Kevin Kline portrays Frank Getchell. Getchell is a wealthy businessman, but we are supposed to accept him as a grizzled New Englander. (Inigo Montoya, yes; The Pirate King, yes. Grizzled New Englander, no.)

The movie shows us how a talented realtor works to match owners and buyers. It also shows us views of the beautiful Atlantic seacoast.

(Actually Nova Scotia, not Massachusetts.)

I enjoyed The Good House, mostly because of Sigourney Weaver's outstanding performance. The film has a very weak IMDb rating of 6.4. This is a case where I say, "Did they see the same movie that I saw?" I rated the movie 8. I recommend it.

When it is all done I suppose the main message of this movie could be "The importance of recovering addicts keeping in touch with their support group."

The cast features two of our favorites over the years, both in their 70s when this movie was shot, Sigourney Weaver as Hildy Good and Kevin Kline as Frank Getchell. They live in a smaller coastal Massachusetts community (apparently filmed in Nova Scotia) and many years earlier had something of a love relationship. Now they are just old friends, she a Real Estate agent, he the owner of a construction business.

Hildy had married and now has two adult daughters, her husband had left her some years back for a man but they remained friends enough to be at same holiday meals with family.

Hildy has a history, she drank too much, so much that sometimes she had no recollection of the prior day, even if a few bad things had happened. At one point her family and friends did an intervention, she recovered but in more recent years was pretending to go to meetings, and was secretly drinking on her own, usually a bottle of Merlot from the several cases she kept in her basement.

So this is really a story about Hildy, and builds on the apparently accurate concept that an alcoholic is incapable of throttling his or her alcohol intake, so it is abstain completely or revert to being a dangerous drunk.

There is a story arc, things get better by the end of the movie which is very well done with interesting, authentic dialog and stellar performances, especially from Weaver and Kline.

My wife and I watched it at home, streaming on Prime.

I'm glad I continued to watch this movie. When the main character played by Sigourney Weaver speaks directly to us viewers I tend to fall completely out of the action. Such films are not for me. Usually. The Good house is the exception.

For Sigourney Weaver is magnificent in this story about an alcoholic real estate agent who apparently has "full control". The plot is set in a small, idyllic town, and our protagonist knows most things about most people.

Yes, it's about alcoholism, but just as much about life in a small town - for better or for worse. The togetherness and the cozy environment are excellently portrayed. As well as all the secrets that people in a small town think they have. When it comes to the depiction of an alcoholic's life, this is shown in a different way here than in many other films. What I like is that it shows that an alcoholic is first and foremost a human being, with an alcohol problem. Not the other way around.

Many good supporting roles here, but Sigourney is the one that everything revolves around and is about in all the scenes. This is her film, and another proof of the versatile and talented actress she is.