It’s challenging to envision a more dispiriting setback for an adult that having to move back into Mom and Dad’s place after almost two decades. Unfortunately, this is exactly where Amy (Melanie Lynskey) lands with a thud in Hello I Must Be Going, following her husband’s flight into another woman’s arms. While welcoming and generous, Amy’s wealthy parents Ruth and Stan (Blythe Danner and John Rubinstein) lack the patience to properly address their daughter’s slide into a hollow-eyed quagmire of depression. Hence Ruth’s pointed, somewhat clueless suggestion that Amy stop shuffling around their suburban Connecticut manse and pull herself together. Specifically, Ruth asks Amy to don a “nice dress” for a dinner party where a potential Big Fish client of Stan’s will be in attendance with his family. (The unspoken alternative is “Or get out of sight.”)
Amy reluctantly complies, and it is at this party that she encounters the client’s stepson Jeremy (Christopher Abbott), a handsome nineteen-year-old actor who oozes sensitivity amid all the bourgeois pleasantries. He and Amy surreptitiously establish some commonalities over the dinner conversation—he played Mapplethorpe on stage, she’s a former photographer—and by the end of the night the pair are kissing furiously in the next room. What might have been a fleeting misstep turns into a full-on May-December affair as adolescent hormones and divorcée loneliness take over. Before long, Amy is sneaking out at midnight like a high schooler with a secret flame, thoroughly revitalized by the attentions of a man fifteen years her junior, if a bit shamefaced about her situation.
Working from a screenplay by Sarah Koskoff, director Todd Louiso (Love Liza) hews to the conventions of American independent cinema in all its aggressively quirky glory. Accordingly, the film relies on the expected medley of awkward situations, earnest warmth, and the occasional upwelling of screeching emotion. It’s fairly boilerplate stuff as indie relationship dramedies go, right down to the singer-songwriter soundtrack, but the proceedings are enlivened by two factors. First, Koskoff adds just enough unexpectedly cynical zigzags to the script that it winds up in some gratifyingly unusual places. Second: Melanie Lynskey. Her sparkling presence is not necessarily the only appealing aspect of Hello I Must Be Going, but she is absolutely the best thing the film has going for it by a enormous margin. With her wide-eyed glances and sour-apple grimaces, Lynskey is both achingly funny and rich source of authentic pathos. The quavering bursts of whispered swearing she unleashes as Amy are among the giddiest moments of pure character in American film this year.
