The utter subservience of American pop culture to baby boomers over the past 50-odd years has engendered justifiable resentment among members of the subsequent alphabet generations. They might, then, find both laughs and solace in the Kevin Bacon–Kyra Sedgwick vehicle “The Best You Can.” Boomers still dominate the storyline. But all along it, aging chickens are coming home to roost.
It’s a very romantic comedy, one that reunites the married actors on screen for the first time since 2004. But writer-director Michael J. Weithorn’s feature is at the same time a catalog of senior-oriented issues and crises: Indignant offspring. Financial instability. Lack of health insurance. Dementia. Enlarged prostates. Not everyone has every problem. But they certainly intersect.
Cynthia Rand (Ms. Sedgwick, not quite a boomer), is a successful urologist who some 26 years earlier married the then-dashing, 57-year-old Warren Rand (Judd Hirsch), a legal star and a former Watergate prosecutor. Warren, now 83 years old, is losing touch with reality; when he forgets to set the burglar alarm one night, an intruder breaks in, a frantic call is made, and Cynthia winds up bonking security guard Stan Olszewski (Mr. Bacon) over the head with a frying pan when he crawls in a window to investigate. It is not quite the classic meet-cute, though cute enough, contusions aside: Stan is less concerned about his head than with the location of Cynthia’s bathroom.
She will become his doctor, out of a sense of both guilt and gratitude for the help he gives to her and Warren; she waives the usual fee, which he can’t pay anyway. But amid the various situations that arise out of the unlikely Cynthia-Stan relationship is a sense of retribution for youthful sins. Stan, who seems to have been a cop and a musician at different points in his life, has a talented daughter (Brittany O’Grady) who harbors a self-destructive streak regarding the realities of the music business and a not-coincidental resentment of dad; he disappeared during her childhood, post-divorce. Cynthia, who in her 20s entered a marriage that any actuarial table would have advised strongly against, is almost apologetic for finding herself wed to Warren. He’s increasingly befuddled, an embarrassment to her, eventually a danger to himself.
What Stan and Cynthia share as they develop a strictly text-messaging relationship (how contemporary!) is not just regret, but a hope that things will get better. Which they won’t. At least not without a modicum of heartbreak. And a double dose of Flomax.
The boomer afflictions that create the situations in “The Best You Can”—physical, mental, financial, attitudinal—are handled gently, though with enough weight to provide a foundation for the charm brought by Ms. Sedgwick and Mr. Bacon, who are playing people from opposite ends of the class spectrum but find common tragicomic ground. Many of the differences in the characters’ destinies have been due to circumstances beyond their control, and perhaps their choices have been likewise inevitable, though the payoff is a poignancy that enriches the comedy. Without giving much away, there’s a scene toward the end of the film that is supposed to be about grief but is perhaps the funniest sequence in the whole movie, partly because it rings so true.
“The Best You Can” may be a movie for everyone, but one may need a particular appreciation for the cosmically absurd to really get the joke.
The Best You Can
Thursday, Netflix
Mr. Anderson is the Journal’s TV critic.
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