[three-star-rating]Sally Field, Max Greenfield, Stephen Root, Wendi McClendon-Covey, Tyne Daly, Peter Gallagher[/three-star-rating]
A great performer can make a bad film good; she’ll never make it great. Doris is not terrible. It’s got its problems – mostly a vacillating tone, from comedy to drama to even stalker thriller. What keeps this boat from completely tanking is Sally Field as the title character.
Every so often, Doris cares about its lead as much as it wants us to. The rest of the time, it’s makes us squirm and wince as it dives from embarrassment to cliché and back.
We’re all told it’s never too late to start living, but Doris raises doubts. Spinster Doris has spent her adult life – up until her 60s – in a dead-end office job. In her free time, she devours romance novels while taking care of her ailing mother. Doris also hoards, carrying the junk she finds on NYC curbs to her Manhattan office and her Staten Island home.
Doris’s life could’ve continued that way until the end. A conflagration of incidents pushes change. Her mother dies. She and best friend Daly attend a motivational speaker (Gallagher); he convinces Doris to take risks. Then, sexy 30-something John (Greenfield) joins Doris’s office. The older lady starts a serious, slightly creepy pursuance of John. Her predatory behaviors come replete with romantic fantasies, fake social media profiles, and ambushing of John’s other relationships.
That’s where Doris starts raising questions it refuses to answer. Is Fields’ Doris painfully shy or wildly extroverted? Is she sexually predatory or deeply innocent? Could she be clueless or dangerously unbalanced? Fields does a brilliant job molding this collection of competing tics into someone who almost seems real. Almost. In this character study, I clearly sensed that she’s socially inept. However, I also often questioned her basic IQ.
Comedian Michael Showalter directs Doris with a jaunty pace. Yet, he cannot decide what sort of film he’s making. He casts other comedians, but too much of what happens is sad and somewhat humiliating, not funny. When Doris is given a couple scenes of true pathos, Fields shines. We get a sense of the glorious journey this film could’ve taken.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve always disliked films where people consistently embarrass themselves out of cluelessness. It seems a sort of cruelty to show characters who don’t know how uncomfortable they make other people. However, I sense that others like this as a plot (hence, the popularity of almost all of Adam Sandler’s and Will Farrell’s films.)
Personally, I wanted to see more of Doris’s heart. Show me her life with her mother, her time in the house full of detritus and memories, her navigating her thoughtless brother (Root) and his selfish wife (McClendon-Covery). Definitely, I needed more sensitivity. I wanted to know Doris as a timid, lost soul who realizes she let life pass her by.
[rating-key]
With a solid performance and a couple amazing, whiz-bang scenes (especially with Daly), Field shows us what Doris could’ve achieved. Doris never quite sinks, but it definitely doesn’t know where it wants to take us.
You must be logged in to post a comment.