When a parent dies, the children have an instinctual expectation that this is the end of the surviving parent's love life. The noble widow or widower who bravely accepts their golden years on their own, aside from a few friends and church outings, is the image fixed in our brain by culture.
But the human heart craves others, so it's not unusual for an older person to find another relationship. It can be weird for their kids, but what if your father suddenly became involved with another man after a lifetime of putting on a straight face to the world?
That's the setup of "Give or Take," a sensitive and well-acted drama starring Jamie Effros, who co-wrote the script with director Paul Riccio. He plays Martin, a typical 30-something New Yorker who works in a skyscraper, two things that tend to make people inclined to look down on everyone else.
He arrives in Cape Cod, his boyhood home, after his father Kenneth has passed. They have barely spoken during the past few years since his mother died, during which time his dad was in a committed relationship with Ted (Norbert Leo Butz), who was his landscaper -- still is -- and became his live-in boyfriend.
Martin isn't outrightly homophobic about his dad's relationship, but it clearly makes him uncomfortable. It's more like he feels like his father had been lying to him all his life. He recoils at the descriptions the locals have of his father as a warm and life-loving individual who was kind to everyone, which he can't square with the hard man he knew as his dad.
There's also a bit of a white collar/blue collar divide, as Ted is a homegrown local, the sort of laid-back guys who barely made it through high school and wound up in service jobs taking cares of the houses and cars of the wealthier, educated folks who take up vacation or retirement homes on the Cape.
Martin is looking for a quick coda to his dad's life: a simple service, pack up his things and sell the house. The local real estate agent queen, Patty K -- played by Cheri Oteri, and boy I loved seeing her on screen again -- is already sniffing around for a commission, and hinting at an offer for his dad's little bungalow in the low seven figures.
Of course, it wasn't just his dad's house. Ted has lived there for the past seven years and naturally has an expectation that he will keep doing so. But he and Kenneth never got married, Martin is the only one mentioned in the will, so he's pretty much at Martin's mercy.
The film is a quiet, slow-paced dance of exchanges and gradual shifts in mood. Martin and Ted go from pleasantries to barely speaking to... something else. This isn't the sort of movie where the two will wind up as lifelong friends, but hopefully come to an understanding about the dead man who ties them inextricably together.
A few other characters flit in and out of the story. There's Emma (Joanne Tucker), who pours at the local bar and was Martin's friend back in high school. She has bright eyes and a tired face, is perfectly comfortable living in Cape Cod, which Martin can't even fathom. They were always "almost a thing" back in the day, and he's thinking about what could have been.
He also has a girlfriend back in the city, Lauren (Annapurna Sriram), a typical Big Apple woman who's obsessed with having the right clothes, attending the right parties, and having a boyfriend who will become a husband who checks all the right boxes. Romance is just an accessory.
We also meet Terrence (Louis Cancelmi), another local who cleans pools and digs holes in the beach where he can smoke weed, the sort of guy who is likely dismissed by others as a loser but seems to have a better perspective on life than any of them.
Oh, and I enjoyed Jaden Waldman as Colin, the quiet kid who lives next door who has a penchant for escaping his parents' squabbling by hiding in a garbage can he's filled with water -- sort of his own ersatz isolation tank. He and Martin begin a gentle sort of friendship that, unfortunately, the movie misplaces.
That's pretty much how I felt about the sum of "Give or Take." It introduces us to a lot of warm characters and sets them into motion to dance through the plot, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason to it. Like Martin and Emma, we feel like we're always on the verge of a lot of connections that just never happen.
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