It's one of life's perpetual and perplexing questions about relationships, whether romantic, platonic, or familial: How do you find balance between being supportive and being an enabler? That is the question faced by Wanda (Edie Falco), as she is constantly rescuing the people in her life. Or she would be facing it, if all that rescuing gave her five minutes to think about what she was doing.
Wanda is a bookkeeper. In the evenings, she visits her clients, restoring order to their accounts. The rest of the time, she tries to restore order to the chaotic lives of her two adult children, and her dotty mother, Grace (Jeannie Berlin). Her daughter, Sarah (Kayli Carter), is eight months pregnant. Her son, Mark (Charlie Tahan), is a recovering drug addict whose therapist is giving up on him. Whenever Wanda is rescuing one of them, she gets a call from one of the others, in crisis or just needing a ride. Wanda is endlessly patient, compassionate, and capable, whether she is dropping off neatly wrapped clean laundry and helpfully labeled containers of food for the family, bailing Mark out of jail, or reassuring Sarah that her baby is doing fine and her plans to have a big wedding just before her due date will work out.
Wanda is also very giving to two different romantic partners, the genial Marshall (Michael Rapaport) and a college professor named Sophie (Sepideh Moafi). Marshall cares for Wanda but he is despondent. His broken wrist is keeping him from the athletic activities that are the center of his life and it has catapulted him into an existential mid-life crisis. Sophie's interest in Wanda is mostly sex, and she loves how giving Wanda is in bed. She's not willing to introduce Wanda to any of her friends, and they don't really talk about anything. One person exists whom Wanda can respond to with any impatience or anger: her ex, Henry (Bradley Whitford), the father of Sarah and Mark, now remarried with three young children. When she meets someone she has not seen since high school (a dreamy Michael Beach), she immediately volunteers to help him with his problem.
"I'll Be Right There" is everything we hope for from an indie favorite. It's got quirky but endearing and believable characters, sharp dialogue, and layered, moving performances from everyone in the cast. This goes even for the brief but memorable supporting roles by Fred Grandy ("The Love Boat") as a doctor, Geoffrey Owens ("The Cosby Show") as a therapist, and Jack Mulhurn as Sophie's fiancé, Eugene. Each of those encounters is a small movie in itself. Berlin is a joy to watch as she (wrongly) anticipates a doctor's diagnosis and gets up to leave before he can say anything, and as she hilariously tells her granddaughter a story about her late husband. (I did wonder whether her reference to pecan pie was a callback to her best-remembered role as the abandoned wife in "The Heartbreak Kid.")
And Falco, of course, is superb. She makes us understand her character better than her character understands herself. Wanda may not think there's anything wrong with the way she careens from one disaster to another, but we see how disconnected she is from her feelings. At one point, as she becomes more self-aware, she says that the constant urgency "tickles" her. What that means is that it feeds her need to feel needed and gives her an excuse not to think about what she wants.
Screenwriter Jim Beggarly deftly combines believable characters with a solid narrative structure. Sarah, Mark, and Grace feel very real, but they also represent three different kinds of pulls on Wanda. Sarah is high-strung and needy. She relies on Wanda for reassurance, and seeing how helpless Eugene feels about the amount of reassurance Sarah demands from him helps Wanda begin to understand that she isn't solving Sarah's problems -- and that she shouldn't be. Mark resents Wanda's help and finds her concern about him infantilizing. And Grace seems to be living on a completely other plane. She barely notices Wanda's help, unless it means taking her for ice cream.
The title says it all. "I'll be right there" is how Wanda responds to the constant calls for help. But it can also be seen as a poignant reminder that spending her time at all the "right theres" is what keeps her from having a "here."
