Hello I Must Be Going

Melanie Lynskey, who first came to Americans' attention as a teenager in Peter Jackson's excellent 1994 "Heavenly Creatures" (opposite an equally green Kate Winslet), returns in "Hello I Must Be Going," a romantic comedy sprinkled with sadness and truthiness. Lynskey plays Amy, an anything-but-gay divorcée who's "staying" with her parents (or, as they call it after three months, "living" with them). Her husband left her; she'd given up her master's program in photography when she married him; and now she hasn't left the house or changed her oversized t-shirt in weeks. When her dad's important new potential clients come to dinner with their 19-year-old son Jeremy (Christopher Abbott), there's an instant May-December connection - but will it turn her life around or bring her to a new rock bottom? There are four or five big, out-loud laughs in "Hello I Must Be Going," an appealing vehicle for Lynskey with nice work by Blythe Danner and John Rubinstein as the 'rents (though you'll feel ancient remembering Rubinstein as Pippin). At times, though, the movie feels overwritten - movieish (we don't need to hear five times how everything will turn out fine if only Dad lands this account) - and, taking place among the elite of Westport, Connecticut, comes fully coated in an embryotic sac of assumed privilege.