Hello, My Name is Doris – the Exploress

By Katherine Monk

Self-help. It’s two four-letter words stuck together, but it still adds up to “fucked.”

That doesn’t mean there isn’t great worth in the reams of published work on the subject of finding one’s bliss, it just means you’re probably scraping the bottom of the hope bucket when you pick up a book called “How to Be Alive.”

Doris knows. She’s been crab-walking across the bottom of the tank for years. An aging outcast at her hipster office, Doris sits behind her cubicle walls behind a barricade of clutter, outputting accounting spreadsheets in silence while her co-workers chortle behind her back.

She’s completely recognizable. Every office has a brand of Doris – the woman no one really knows, but everyone suspects owns several cats and a subscription to Readers’ Digest. In days past, she would have been called the spinster, the crone, an object of pity and ridicule, but Michael Showalter’s new movie is a coming out party for this dated female stereotype.

If anything, Hello, My Name is Doris is a forced-smile affirmation of self – a feel-good movie for menopausal women dreaming of hot romance with a younger man. That alone is enough of a hook to pull in the target audience, but thanks to Sally Field’s sweet mix of drama and comedy, Hello, My Name is Doris is more than Pretty Woman on hormone replacement therapy, it strikes a universal note by exploring fear.

Doris isn’t really aware how limited her life has become because she’s lost in routine. More importantly, she’s denied her own feelings and her own needs for so long, that she doesn’t feel anything except a faint sense of emptiness which she promptly fills with junk she picks up off the street.

It’s only when she internalizes the “Why Not Me?” idea of a self-help guru (Michael Gallagher) that Doris grants herself permission to dream, and for Doris, that fantasy takes the form of John (Max Greenfield), the new creative executive at her workplace.

John is young and handsome and kind. But he also has a girlfriend, and no lingering Oedipal complex, which means Doris’s romantic desires don’t even register on his radar.

He just thinks she’s kooky and kind of sweet, which gives the comic premise plenty of room to breathe as Doris starts a Facebook account, and with the help a 13-year-old, starts Catfishing (cyber-stalking under a false identity) John.

Because the whole idea is riddled with profound pathos and the possibility of seat-squirming embarrassment, the movie could have belly-flopped into a tepid pool of awkwardness. But it doesn’t, and again, that’s thanks to Field, the cast, and Showalter and Laura Terruso’s script.

Doris Miller is a fully developed character. She has strengths, weaknesses and neurotic tendencies, so when she engages with the world around her, we understand where she’s coming from. That makes a world of difference because it softens the edges of inherent farce and makes Doris easy to identify with, even if she’s wearing a yellow pantsuit and a neon visor for the 1984 Olympics.

Showalter gives Field big moments of dramatic catharsis in addition to a clown suit, but it’s the subtle bouts of comedy that really prove Field’s unmatched talent. She can turn a scene from light to dark on a dime, without giving you whiplash, because she’s always got a handle on the soul inside the character.

Doris feels alive and full of unexpressed love. Her aim is noble, so even if the scenario is designed to elicit laughs and the script sometimes hits a pothole of cliché, we’re filled with so much empathy that we barely notice the bump.

@katherinemonk

THE EX-PRESS, April 22, 2016

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