‘The Best You Can' Review: Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick Star in a Congenial but Unremarkable Dramedy About an Unlikely Friendship
Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick bring their vivid screen presence and expert timing to The Best You Can, elevating this low-key, Tribeca-premiering dramedy. With strong performances and a fresh premise about an unexpected friendship in middle age, but far too many creaky comic tropes, the uneven film is always watchable but never pops off the screen in a gripping way.
It's the second feature written and directed by Michael J. Weithorn, a co-creator of The King of Queens and a veteran writer on other sitcoms. It's simply descriptive and not a disparagement to say that with its often strained plot and quick-hit sitcom timing, the film is most likely to appeal to an undemanding audience and an older demographic.
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Sedgwick plays Cynthia, whose brilliant husband, Warren (Judd Hirsch, reliably on point), once on the staff of the Watergate committee, is now 83 and sliding into dementia. At the start she appears overly chatty and hyper, a character trying too hard for comic effect — especially when she first meets Stan, a security guard.
Bacon slides easily into the role of Stan, but his character is also introduced as a comic cliché. In the most blatant of the sitcom-style tropes, Stan has a prostate problem and while patrolling neighborhoods at night uses shrubbery as a makeshift urinal. When the alarm in Cynthia's house goes off and calls him to the scene, he urgently asks to use her bathroom — and what a coincidence, she is the perfect person to treat his problem, as she announces with fluttery, over-the-top enthusiasm.
The forced comedy calms down a bit when they also begin a friendship, often through text messages, which the actors deliver in voiceover. Cynthia tells Stan about grappling with her husband's situation, and he confides in her about his fraught relationship with his daughter, Sammi (Brittany O'Grady), a struggling singer-songwriter who lacks confidence. The text technique works more gracefully than in most films, but again lame stabs at humor intrude. As they get to know each other, Cynthia asks if Stan is in touch with his ex-wife, and he texts back, 'Only by voodoo doll.' Yikes.
As the friendship between Stan and Cynthia develops, it has some touching moments. Sedgwick lets us see how much Cynthia still loves and is devoted to her husband, and also how lonely his condition has made her. And Bacon is so vibrant as the intelligent, sharp-witted Stan that he makes you wish Weithorn's screenplay had done more to fill in the character's backstory. How did this guy turn out to be such an underachiever and such an awkward father?
Wisely, the film acknowledges but doesn't overplay the inevitable romantic overtones the friendship takes on. And Bacon and Sedgwick never let their status as a well-known married couple in real life intrude on their character's delicate, tentative relationship. Each gets a long, emotional monologue near the end that they deliver with smooth naturalism. It's easy to imagine how much more pedestrian the film would have been with lesser actors in those roles.
Weithorn gets strong performances from the supporting cast, notably O'Grady, whose brief musical scenes as Sammi are solid additions to the film. The father-daughter relationship may be the film's most believable, as we see that Stan means well and tries to encourage her but says all the wrong things.
Olivia Luccardi plays Stan's younger sometime-hookup, whose sexting with him is played for some effective laughs. Ray Romano appears in a brief cameo in a video call as a doctor friend of Cynthia's who advises her on Warren's condition. And Meera Rohit Kumbhani, as Warren's caregiver, has one of the film's stronger more unexpected twists when it turns out she has recorded the memories he is still able to recapture.
If only the film had risen to that level of surprise and emotional poignancy more often, with more of the wistfulness that comes to infuse Cynthia and Stan's friendship and with humor that was less eye-rolling.
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USA Today
an hour ago
- USA Today
Beyoncé's 'Cowboy Carter' tour celebrates country music while also holding it accountable
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Atlantic
an hour ago
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Wall Street Journal
an hour ago
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Manifesto House' Review: Living the Architect's Dream
The critic Paul Goldberger, voicing a sentiment many know intuitively to be true but have perhaps never articulated, described architecture as 'the only art that we have no choice but to engage with.' You can avoid museums, concert halls and screens big and little, but buildings, like the poor, will always be with us. And so it follows that to understand buildings, it can be useful to understand the thought processes behind them. In 'The Manifesto House,' the writer and curator Owen Hopkins is eager to get into the minds of architects whose residential buildings, in the words of his subtitle, 'changed the future of architecture.' In 21 chapters divided into three somewhat overlapping subcategories—'Looking Back,' 'Looking Out' and 'Looking Forward'—Mr. Hopkins seeks to explore houses that do not 'reflect received or prevailing ideas that have become internalised among architects, builders and clients/users, and are held and enacted almost unconsciously.' The houses featured here sprang from the minds of disparate figures across time, from the Georgian neoclassicist John Soane to the postmodernist Robert Venturi, and the book includes widely known figures such as Frank Lloyd Wright and those who will likely be unfamiliar even to adepts, such as the contemporary Senegalese firm Worofila. Any architect can imagine a daring design, and many have. Yet, as the author notes, few 'manifesto houses' exist, for the simple reason that 'it is so rare for architects to get the opportunity to put what are ultimately polemics into practice.' Clients, those pesky people who actually have to live in most houses, won't allow it. That is why 'manifesto houses,' in Mr. Hopkins's definition, tend to be built by architects for themselves to occupy, or otherwise for genuflecting admirers with 'deep interests in architecture and what it can do.' Mr. Hopkins's definition has two aspects, which presents potential hazards: For inclusion, he states, houses should contain a polemical element and also have changed the course of architectural history. It's not clear, though, that all his chosen examples adhere to these criteria. Who can doubt that Andrea Palladio's Villa Rotonda (1566–ca. 1590), the home outside of Venice that is the subject of the book's first chapter, changed the future of architecture? Its strident symmetry and extended loggias continue to echo in buildings today, not least in the neoclassical public architecture constructed in the nascent American republic.
