After her stay-at-home husband leaves her, a workaholic attorney is forced to reinvent her life and discovers both a vulnerability and inner strength she had not yet tapped all while caring for her young son, ailing father and household all by herself.
Chris Messina's directorial debut is a strong one, mainly because of a beautifully wounded leading performance by Marty Elizabeth Winstead that's full of strength, growth, and heartwarming soul.
The problem with Chris Messina's directorial debut isn't so much badness as it is superfluousness -- that it is less its own discrete thing than a redundant genre study in This Type of Movie.
Although it's enjoyable, actor Chris Messina's directorial debut is somehow less than the sum of its parts, wading only through the shallow end of familiar human conflicts resolved too conveniently to satisfy.
As she flails through a few dubious choices, the character may be on the kind of self-discovery path we've seen in countless other films; but Winstead makes the outcome seem far from preordained.
The movie's quirky setting pays off dividends where you least expect them. At such moments, the movie's humanism finally seems unforced, and everything is the better for that.
