As crippling as the fear of missing out may be on our ability to lead a normal, healthy life, perhaps the only thing worse is the regret of allowing yourself to become stuck in a rut of your own creation. This regret is given a playful yet poignant spin in Michael Showalter’s Hello, My Name is Doris, which overcomes predictability and conventionality with perceptiveness and good humor.
We meet Doris, played spectacularly by Sally Field, at the funeral of her mother, whom she has devoted her life to caring for. Doris does not give the greatest first impression, a fact of which she is well aware. She’s always lived in the same house on Staten Island, where she hoards useless items of questionable sentimental value. She becomes lost in romance novels more than she engages with the outside world. Her coworkers dismiss her as a weird old lady and never give her a second thought. After developing an infatuation with her company’s new art director, John (Max Greenfeld)—complete with daydreams straight out of her tacky paperbacks—she breaks out of her old routines to impress him, including creating fake social media profiles, listening to electronica and indulging the teenage experience she never had with the help of her best friend’s 13-year-old daughter.
Hello, My Name is Doris spends the first 60 minutes on what appears to be the wish fulfillment of a quirky baby boomer coming out of her shell. After spending time with Doris and spotting a CD from his favorite band on her desk (which she discovered through her social media deception), John finds Doris delightful to be around once he gives her a chance, as does the hip, younger Brooklyn crowd. This scenario is rather believable for New York, given its massive demographic shifts—call it gentrification, renewal, what have you—and the ever-changing reputations of its neighborhoods, where hipster transplants live beside longtime natives with little or no genuine cultural exchange or social interaction.
The first hour of up-and-up for Doris inevitably leads to 30 minutes of fallout. There was no way her faux profile shenanigans would go unpunished, and the disconnect between her romantic feelings and John’s platonic admiration could never last. But even as the dominoes fall exactly as expected, our sympathy for Doris is real. She never wanted to be where she is; she cannot shake the feeling that the decision to stay behind to care for her mother, while noble, robbed her of the life she might have had. She was once engaged, but couldn’t join him when he got a job in Flagstaff because of her mother. Her brother Todd (Stephen Root) founded a successful company and had a family, which he could do because he wasn’t tied to a single location. Her only taste of emotion from the outside world comes from romance novels and items she hoards.
Hello, My Name is Doris is a departure for absurdist Showalter (Wet Hot American Summer, TV’s “The State”). It’s often funny, usually touching and altogether better than the sum of its parts. Even if you predict every single twist, turn and emotional beat, you will still find plenty to enjoy. And it would be criminal to miss Sally Field in what could be her finest performance in years.
Hello, My Name is Doris
R, 90 minutes
Violet Crown Cinema and Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
Playing this week
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
The Shops at Stonefield, 244-3213
10 Cloverfield Lane
Allegiant, Batman v Superman
Eye in the Sky
God’s Not Dead 2
I Saw the Light
Meet the Blacks
Miracles From Heaven
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2
Zootopia
Violet Crown Cinema
200 W. Main St., Downtown Mall, 529-3000
10 Cloverfield Lane
Allegiant
Batman v Superman
Deadpool
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Zootopia
