After looking at the marketing for The Meddler, the first thing one must think is that it’s a chick flick. What one might never expect is the fact that it’s a backhanded slap to everyone that thinks that’s the case. The story here is surprisingly inconsequential and is mainly a vehicle to set up as many situations showing the perverse nature of the chick flick as possible. Susan Sarandon stars as Marnie, a recently widowed woman who has lots of money. That last characteristic is extremely important here. Marnie, after not being able to connect with her daughter (Rose Byrne), starts to do good deeds for her daughter’s friends by giving away lots of money. Money is important to the central themes of The Meddler. There’s a lot of moments of people whole heartedly thanking Marnie for giving them so much money and making big speeches about it. This is all stuff that you’ve seen in every tripe Gary Marshall affair, but The Meddler has no interest in sinking to that level. It instead wants to show you that ultimately all of that is a facade, and the excellent direction from writer/director Lorene Scafaria ramps up how uncomfortable this is. People pour their hearts out over money, and Marnie hides her pain. Everything here is fake, but just outside the frame, the painful reality is sitting. Yet, lots of movies that have a good central through line aren’t perfect, and The Meddler is one of them. First, there is the unfortunate problem of trying to make a spin on a genre, but doing it by presenting the film in similar aesthetics. There will be people who simply see this as a straight chick flick, and that’s because it plays just like that. The comparison of Marnie’s almost scattershot character and the falsity of the proceedings is a difficult message to pull out, but if you look, it’s there. There’s also the fact that The Meddler plays extremely scattershot, and not all that interesting once you get past the darkness of its core. Some characters are simply forgotten after a couple of scenes and others are not given worthy arches. It’s a testament then to say that Susan Sarandon absolutely dominates and holds the film together. There’s other fine work from J.K. Simmons as a guy so nice you can’t help but wonder if he’s actually a bad guy, and Rose Byrne as the daughter who has to lift the other end of the film, but Sarandon completely embodies everything the movie stands for. Marnie may seem more like a catalyst than a character, but Sarandon hasn’t really been able to so fully dominate a film a recent, and she goes a long way in instilling Marnie with a sense of life. Behind those things, there’s not really much to The Meddler. It’s nice to see a film that isn’t scared to completely upend its target audience by making them think about the basis of what the genre really means to them. Too bad some of The Meddler doesn’t really coalesce. I give The Meddler a 6.5 out of 10.
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |