tieman64
Todd Louiso's "Hello I Must Be Going" stars Melanie Lynskey as Amy, a young woman who moves in with her wealthy parents after a bitter divorce.During "Going's" first act, Louiso indulges in light satire. Amy's wealthy parents are mocked for being vapid, a more liberal family are mocked for being airheads and a son fakes being gay in order to flatter his progressive, ultra-tolerant parents. The film then turns into a little Girl Power screed. Here Amy learns to sympathise with her mother, who's been neglected by Amy's oft absent father. Amy also has an affair with a nineteen year old guy (Christopher Abbott), and kicks away her ex-husband, an adulterous man whom Amy delights in milking for a divorce settlement. At first glance the film thus seems to be indulging in a little reverse-sexism, but Louiso has other intentions. Amy's dad is ultimately a nice guy and Abbott's character ultimately teaches Amy to love herself.Ever since "The Graduate" (1967) and "Harold and Maude" (1971), the older woman-younger man paradigm has been fairly mainstream. "Hello I Must Be Going", though, seems to offer the reverse of the countless indie films released annually in which a young, pixie faced woman exists only to "heal" the wounds of a depressed older man. And so here Amy self-identifies as a loser, incapable of being loved, an "ailment" which an incredulous fling promptly cures; nothing like being adored by a teenager, apparently, to kick-start your libido.6/10 – Worth one viewing.
ben_robertson
This film screened at the 2012 New Hampshire Film Festival in Portsmouth, NH and several of the people I spoke to after really enjoyed it. I will admit that I felt it was slow at times. However, for anyone who has been through a divorce or knows someone who has been through a divorce, this is a fun film that I think can help a lot of people. I saw myself in some of the characters and I saw my friends and family. Two friends who saw the movie said that one scene came right out of their own lives after they got divorced. So while it may not be for everyone, I highly recommend this film to people who can relate to the material and think they might enjoy seeing the difficult subject of divorce treated with intelligence, humanity and humor.
James D
Hello I Must Be Going is not a glamorous Hollywood film. Not that I don't enjoy the big budget blockbusters every once in a while, but this film was a refreshing departure. There are no flashy cuts or fast-paced action sequences, because it is attempting to tell a far more intimate story. The film is not rushing you along with plot. When the characters talk, they are talking about their inner most fears and desires.The subject of the film, whose life we are let into, is Amy Minksy. A character, who if we met in real life, we would want to walk up to her and just give her a hug. When we first meet Amy, we find out that she is a woman in her mid-thirties, has just been divorced, and is living with her parents at home again. To call her depressed would be wrong, she seems more to me like a person who is stuck, not knowing what direction to go in for the rest of her life. She is slightly assisted in finding her way through the newfound love/lust she gets from 19-year-old Jeremy. An actor, who hates acting on stage, but likes to pretend he is gay in his real world life. They are the perfect couple for each other, and yet the worst, because at any minute the families could find out about their affair, and cause much embarrassment for the two families and trouble in a certain business venture.This film shows us Amy's life, in all of her moments of loneliness, happiness, embarrassment, lust, and so on. And the great thing about the film is it doesn't try to sugar coat anything. The movie feels more real than most I've seen. All the characters that surround Amy have hopes and dreams. You get the impression that everyone has some sort of secret, the audience is just only aware of Amy's. And the most interesting and successful sequences of the film are when those desires are exposed, causing conflicts for the other characters, as it would in real life. All of the actors do a fantastic job of making their characters feel real. And I can't imagine it to have been too difficult for the actors, since the screenwriter seems to know every detail of every character's personal life story, without abruptly stating it in dialog. The script is brilliantly subtle in that way.I think that some people might have a hard time sitting through Hello I Must Be Going, because it is in a lot of ways very different from the usual. The story is told to the audience in quiet conversation. And sometimes, the film can feel repetitive and claustrophobic. There are multiple scenes when Amy and Jeremy go off to have their affair in a different place than before. Although we do learn new information about them in every scene, they still seem to be stuck doing the same things over and over again, in different positions and different places, but really the same thing. Also the movie is told through Amy's eyes, so we only see the things she sees and does, so mainly Jeremy. Amy is unemployed and Jeremy is just a kid, so both individuals don't do much. While I understand the movie is about Amy and should be mostly from her point of view, I wish the film opened up a bit more and explored some of the other characters in their own world. In one particular scene, we learn about Amy's mother Ruth, who is played by the wonderful Blythe Danner. Through most of the film, Amy and Ruth are at each other's throats. But there is a moment they have of understanding one another near the end of the film, which was my favorite scene of the movie, particularly because Blythe Danner and Melanie Lynskey are so fantastic in the scene, and I must say in the entire film.The ending felt a little sudden. Characters continuously ask Amy throughout the film what she wants to do with her life, but she never has an answer. And by the end, she still doesn't have an answer. But she seems okay with that. We don't get the perfect happy ending for Amy, but we get the sense that she is happy. Perhaps that is the point the film is trying to make, sometimes you just don't know what you want to do in life. Maybe the point of the film is it doesn't matter what you do as long as your happy, which Amy seemed to be for a brief moment with Jeremy. Still her plan for what she wants to do by the end of the film doesn't seem like much of an improvement over her plan at the beginning of wearing the same shirt and watching the Marx Brothers everyday. The entire film, we watch Amy through all of her misery, it would have been nice to give her that moment of: "she's going to be all right." Well, she seems perfectly content. So let's just hope she can figure it out.
