The Good House

Sigourney Weaver gets her best role in years playing a North Shore realtor whose seemingly ideal life conceals tides of alcoholism and loneliness.

Sigourney Weaver carved out a nice career despite being, not unlike Lauren Bacall, a woman Hollywood didn’t really know what to do with.

Statuesque, clear-eyed and square-jawed, she became an unlikely action hero with the “Aliens” franchise, scored three Oscar nominations during her heyday and, now in her 70s, has settled into elder stateswoman supporting roles, TV/streaming stuff and occasional featured parts whenever James Cameron feels like making a movie.

Weaver gets her best leading role in years in “The Good House” playing Hildy Good, the top realtor in fictional Wendover, Mass., a quaint little fishing town that has become a North Shore enclave for Boston’s elite and well-to-do. She wears expensive clothes and drives a leased Land Rover as she shows power couples seven-figure fix-er-uppers, is known and respected by everybody in town as a strong, successful businesswoman.

Or, at least that’s the veneer Hildy puts up.

Turns out her former assistant (Kathryn Erbe) stole most of her clients, she’s being bled dry financially supporting two grown daughters and an ex-husband who’s still drawing alimony, and doesn’t really have anyone special in her life.

She’s also a midnight drinker, sneaking into her boathouse where she always has a crate of high-end Merlot stashed. It seems Hildy was the target of an intervention a while back after a few behavioral episodes and a DUI. So now she’s officially sober but, in the parlance of functional alcoholics everywhere, just needs a little something to take the edge off.

“I was born three drinks short of comfortable,” Hildy says during frequent conspiratorial narrations directed at the audience.

Directed by Maya Forbes and Wallace Wolodarsky, who also wrote the screenplay with Thomas Bezucha based on the book by Ann Leary, “The Good House” is an assured dance we share with Hildy, walking a ways with her before realizing she’s stumbling rather than strolling.

During the film, Hildy lures us in, making us believe her drinking really isn’t that big a deal. She never imbibes during the day or in times of crisis, she notes. She seems firmly in control of her little corner of the world, so when she does things like sneak vodka into her supposedly virgin bloody mary during a Thanksgiving feast, we share in her warm glow rather than tut-tutting at falling off the wagon.

Romance even appears to enter Hildy’s life as she takes a shine to Frankie Getchell, an old flame played by Kevin Kline. He runs a garbage and contracting company Hildy uses on her house projects, and she takes a run at him every now and then to get Frankie to sell an empty parcel that’s one of the last prime waterfront spots in Wendover. Somewhere along the way, her sales pitches turn into pitched woo, which is haltingly but willingly received.

Based on the posters and trailers for “The Good House,” you might think it’s a movie centered on a golden years affair between Weaver and Kline’s characters. But it isn’t, really — he’s just a sassy supporting character who turns up from time to time to factor into Hildy’s jingle-jangle journey up and down the happiness ladder.

It’s the lady’s story, and he’s just the nicely creased arm candy.

Gotta say, Weaver and Kline, also a septuagenarian, make for a gorgeous couple, even if he’s deliberately schlumped up for the role. With her regal bearing and — as a couple of nude scenes attest — enduringly lithe frame, Weaver would still draw the most stares in any room she enters.

Kline manages to do a lot more with the role than what’s on the page, giving Frankie an insouciant sort of charm, proudly blue-collar and blarney accent blaring. He’s the sort of guy who works hard to appear without a care, calloused exterior hiding some embarassing soft edges.

But it’s Weaver who is the real marvel. It’s such a dynamic, distinctive female character — something that doesn’t come along as often in the movies as you’d think. I recall Holly Hunter’s Jane Craig in “Broadcast News,” a woman so demonstrably and peculiarly herself, she couldn’t even pretend to be anyone else.

One of Hildy’s great ancestors was among the first women accused during the witch trials in those parts, and she likes to flatter herself she still has a little taint of the forbidden power, able to read people so well she can perform ad-hoc readings so spot-on they’re scary. It’s part of the shawl of mystery she’s carefully knitted and shrouded herself in, which she wields as both sword and shield.

“Women who don’t care what people think end up hanged in the public square,” Hildy says.

The rest of the cast works well off her. Molly Brown and Rebecca Henderson play her daughters, who both adore and resent her; David Rasche is her ex, still friendly despite a life that went in a very different direction; Morena Baccarin is Rebecca, the new rich trophy wife in town, whom Hildy takes a rare shine to; Rob Delaney plays Peter, the kindly village psychiatrist and old ally; and Georgia Lyman makes a strong impression in a few scenes as a struggling mother who’s a client/friend.

With Hildy, all of her clients are friends, and she’d love to make all of her friends clients. But her relationships go only so deep either way, and she lives in that middle space where everyone seems to like her but no one really knows her.

“The Good House” isn’t a romantic movie per se, but it is a portrait of love — a woman, magnificently played by Sigourney Weaver, who has stayed in the same place all her life but is still working to cherish herself and find exactly where she fits.