Romantic comedies often suffer from a stifling lack of perspective, asking audiences to identify with the travails of people too beautiful to be single overcome trite obstacles and predictably end up together. It’s a formula Michael Showalter knows well, having parodied it co-writing 2014’s hit-or-miss They Came Together, but in his new film, Hello, My Name is Doris, directed by Showalter and co-written by him and Laura Terruso, that formula is destabilized by radically changing the protagonist.
Doris (Sally Field) is a sixty-something office worker, who is introduced to us at the funeral of her mother, with whom she lived for her entire life and took care of in old age, even when it meant turning down other opportunities. Doris and her mother shared a house on Staten Island filled with generations of clutter, suggesting that Doris is a saner version of Grey Gardens’ Little Edie, these conditions forming both women into icons of eclectic fashion. At work, Doris is a holdover from a previous era of an American Apparel-esque company, an afterthought to her millennial colleagues, until Doris meets John Fremont (Max Greenfield) an unfailingly nice LA transplant on whom Doris develops a devastating crush. Spurred on by a chance encounter with a motivational speaker (Peter Gallagher), she devises occasions to spend time with him, from a strangely erotic use of a bicycle pump to an electro-pop concert in Williamsburg, where her outsider style inspires musician Baby Goya (Jack Antonoff). These developments are watched with consternation by her longtime best friend Roz (Tyne Daly), who wants Doris to reengage with the world, but perhaps not like this. Doris’s desire for John is so raw and unlikely as to be poignantly embarrassing, even as she makes some genuine connections with John and his hipster friends. Simultaneously, Doris undergoes the difficult process of cleaning and selling the only house she’s ever lived in, under pressure from her brother (Stephen Root) and his less than supportive wife, which finally causes Doris to confront her brother regarding the enormous sacrifices she made to care for their mother while he built a career.
The humor in Hello, My Name is Doris hardly reinvents the wheel, relying mostly on hipster stereotypes and age gags, but it works because the film remains warmhearted and nonjudgmental while Sally Field adds a depth of character rarely seen in the genre. Let out belatedly into a world she hardly understands, her Doris contains a lifetime of unfulfilled longing. At times the film seems prepared to deal her a crushing disappointment, but it never happens because Doris is so unguarded and authentic that she wins over people who were ready to dismiss her on first look. Greenfield also shines as John, who doesn’t see Doris as a romantic possibility, but is open-minded enough to welcome her into his circle as a valued friend, his oblivious politeness only adding to Doris’s confusion.
There are some strange tonal shifts in the movie, as if even the filmmakers weren’t quite sure how to deal with the truly unique Doris. The film ends on an ambiguous note, which could be seen as a cop out or as a tribute to City Lights, another story of unlikely, boundary-crossing love. The uncertainty that Doris introduces to these threadbare plot elements is a testament to the power of inclusion, of giving the stage to other perspectives, taking their desires seriously, and seeing what happens. Not all of Hello, My Name is Doris succeeds, but Doris herself is unforgettable and a welcome inversion of rom-com standards.
