Review: In ‘Mr. Roosevelt,’ an Ailing Cat and a Comedian in Crisis

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/movies/mr-roosevelt-review-noel-wells.html

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In “Mr. Roosevelt,” Emily Martin, a young comedic performer living (not all that well) in Los Angeles, takes a costly last-minute flight back to her former home in Austin, Tex., to visit the now-ailing cat she left there with her ex-boyfriend. The cat, also this movie’s title character, has some metaphoric weight, representing the life Emily left behind. She now wonders if she should have.

As portrayed by the film’s writer and director, Noël Wells, Emily, while mercurially talented, has little idea where she’s going. Upon her Austin return, she witnesses the rather Williams-Sonoma-inflected life her ex, Eric (Nick Thune), has with a very tidy new partner, Celeste (Britt Lower). This raises a welter of resentment in the far less genteel Emily.

A restaurant disaster, during which Emily has a semi-meltdown and spills food all over a borrowed dress, leads her into the view of a waitress, Jen (Daniella Pineda), who’s still pursuing the boho dream in the increasingly bourgeois town. Under Jen’s wing, Emily gets reacquainted with the less proper side of Austin, in which she’s still sometimes at a loss. Potentially topless bathing at the local swimming hole and other challenges lead Emily to some poor decisions (she opts to sleep with a man who’s a little too much like the Los Angeles dirtbags she’s been hooking up with), and some maybe less-poor ones (delivering a few genuine apologies), as she ties up loose ends.

Ms. Wells is appealing onscreen and is a smart writer. She gives Emily some good zingers, including a riff about the inherent sexism of the word “quirky” and one-liners like “burritos are just sleeping bags for rice.” The film fits comfortably into the lineage of movies like “Tiny Furniture” and “Obvious Child,” about young women trying to make sense of their lives, although it’s not quite distinctive enough to be considered outstanding in that company. (The repurposing of a gag I first saw in “Meet the Parents,” concerning the contents of an urn, was rather uninspired.)