There’s a big emotional beat, late in Lisa Steen’s “Late Bloomers,” that culminates with Karen Gillan’s protagonist Louise pleading, with tears in her eyes, “I’m trying!” That moment captures the most endearing but peculiar thing about this wildly talented actor: she has such a gift for conveying a kind of desperate vulnerability, which is not a quality typically in the toolbox (at least convincingly) of a raven-haired Amazonian beauty. But in this film, as in her last year’s “Dual” and her feature directorial effort, the bafflingly underseen “The Party’s Just Beginning,” she excels as characters who are stuck in a kind of arrested post-collegiate state, utterly incapable of getting their shit together, and not even that interested in trying.
READ MORE: SXSW 2023 Preview: 25 Must-See Film & TV Projects To Watch
“Adults are SAD,” Louise announces in the opening scene, and as if to prove it, she’s acting like a sullen teenager; she’s spent the last year recovering from a bad breakup, and now she’s hanging out too late at a drag of a house party. “I have to see Joel, and he has to see how good I’m doing!” she insists, shortly before discovering that Joel no longer lives where she’s camping out. One of his roommates propositions her, and she’s merciless in her rejection: “No way, you’d be a lateral move.”
But later that humiliating evening, she takes a nasty fall while trying to climb into his window – while drunk, it probably goes without saying – and ends up in the hospital. “Is there someone I can call?” asks the nurse. “There is no one,” she replies, with a mixture of cynicism and self-pity. Louise has a broken hip, not exactly an injury typical of her age range, and finds herself sharing a hospital room and then an extended physical therapy regimen with Antonina (Malgorzata Zajaczkowska), an especially sour old Polish woman who speaks not one word of English. They’re a genuinely odd couple – separated by age, temperament, and language, and of course, they dislike each other intensely… at first!
Antonina lives with her granddaughter, who is about to put her in a nursing home; Antonina has other ideas. “This dopey girl can take care of me,” she tells her granddaughter in subtitled Polish. “Ask her; she has no life.” Louise is especially in need of money to care for her own sick mother, so she takes on the gig – and it’s not an easy one, she discovers, during a day-one bout of some very unpleasant bathroom business (for both of them). But she figures it out quickly enough and enjoys their odd dynamic. “I can say whatever I want to you,” she tells Antonina, “and you can say whatever you want to me, and that is the beauty of our relationship!”
You can probably guess where it goes from there. “Late Bloomers” is something of a boilerplate indie dramedy, in which flawed people learn their lessons and try to be better; it is prone, as such films often are, to wrapping things up in too-neat, one-scene bows, while their traumas and tribulations are filled in with flashbacks that ultimately subtract more than they add. Screenwriter Anna Greenfield and director Lisa Steen don’t exactly transcend those tropes, but they make them play again. It’s about as well-acted and enjoyable a version of this particular thing as you’re likely to find.
And they shepherd a handful of moments and performances that smoothly surpass our expectations. It would’ve been easy for Zajaczkowska to make Antonina a caricature. Still, she resists that temptation, with just a couple of brief flashes where her scowling mask flickers away and reveals the humanity underneath. Kevin Nealon appears as Louise’s harried father and shows genuine dramatic chops in just a couple of brief scenes. And the picture features that rarest of rarities, a funny sex scene, with the (still recuperating) Louise insisting, “I am LOVING this!” and “Let’s DO this” through firmly gritted teeth.
There, and throughout “Late Bloomers,” Gillan is just extremely present onscreen, always alive to the moment and its possibilities. The role requires the entirety of her considerable charisma, as the character comes on, initially as abrasive, unlikable, and occasionally martyr-ish (“Everything I touch seems to turn to dirt!” she explains). She’s very good at playing these very messy women, which is part of why it’s so depressing that she’s spending most of her time grinding in the gears of the Marvel machine – but perhaps those paychecks will allow her to continue moonlighting in slight but heartfelt vehicles like this one. [B]
Follow along for all our reviews and coverage of the 2023 SXSW Film & Television Festival.