Amy (Melanie Lynskey) has left her husband and moved back with her parents (Blythe Danner, John Rubinstein). She is depressed and unmotivated. She can barely get up the will to dress nicely for a dinner party. At the party, she begins an affair with 19 year old Jeremy (Christopher Abbott). She becomes energized as she risks discovery of the inappropriate affair.This is Melanie Lynskey's movie and her best performance ever. As always she is her lovable vulnerable self. But she stretches to encompass the many different emotions of her character. The only problem is the perfectly crafted speeches she gives. It's a thin line between poignant emotional truth and too perfect hokey monologue. Luckily Amy is a middle age character, not the usual emo teen. So I'm willing to go with the former, and buy that she's a lit major. Melanie Lynskey finally returns to a lead role in a movie. And she is amazing in it. I hope she will get more chances at the leading lady role in the future.

By this point in time, everybody is drooling over Melanie Lynskey's performance in "Hello I Must Be Going." I am too. But my admiration does not end strictly with her work in this ambitious little movie; there is a lot of due credit owed to her co-stars, particularly newcomer Christopher Abbott, who plays her much-younger lover, and the insistently reliable Blythe Danner as Miss Lynskey's mother. I guess Miss Lynskey is collecting most of the praise because ever since "Heavenly Creatures" in 1994 and her last appearance in "Two and a Half Men" (one of my favorite shows) everybody wants to see her become a big star. But she and everybody else in "Hello I Must Be Going" is in good form. My only wish was that they were encapsulated by a screenplay worthy of their energy and panache.I cannot adequately describe how much I wanted to love this movie. Stories about nonconformist relationships interest me, in real life as well as in the movies. And this premise—a woman completely drained over her recent divorce discovering the true meaning of love and of live in her affair with a younger man—sounds like an absolute winner. Unfortunately, most of the fun and all of the really tender moments are collected in the first 25 minutes and the final 10; these wonderful bits, where I felt my heart strings being yanked on, sandwich a lot of padded-out detritus. And a lot of genuinely unfunny jokes. For instance: when will the romantic comedy genre ever give up on the gag where an elderly woman walks in upon a couple while they are skinny dipping? It wasn't funny when it happened to Campbell Scott and Julia Roberts in "Dying Young" 21 years ago, and it certainly is not funny here.I cannot deny that the movie has great ambitions: it doesn't want to be just a love story; it wants to make some subtle yet true observations about life. Both Miss Lynskey and Mr. Abbott, in the course of their on-screen relationship, embark on an emotional journey, guiding them to realizing the emptiness surrounding them. A key moment in the picture is when they are having dinner with each other's families, and both are indirectly being put on the hot spot: Miss Lynskey's divorce keeps getting brought up, and Mr. Abbott's self-hated career in stage acting is the only dinner conversation his mother can think of. And then there is the final ten minutes, including a wonderful and entirely honest sequence about marriage, set in a New York diner. And I must commend screenwriter Sarah Koskoff for having the guts to write an ending in which not all of the bows are tied, not every character makes their amends.The remarkable thing, however, is that Miss Lynskey and Mr. Abbott do not spend nearly as much time together as you would imagine. And many of their moments are punctuated by sex scenes—oh, boy, am I getting sick and tired of those as well! Thankfully, they are photographed very quick, but they do not seem to register an erotic or emotional effect. I suppose the idea was that the two characters used the sex to fill the voids in their own lives, but surely there are better ways for characters to bond. I personally am more interested in movie-couples who do not jump into bed (or into the backseat of a car, in this case) two days after they first lay eyes on one another. And after a while, good as they are, Miss Lynskey and Mr. Abbott run out of interesting things to talk about; they just start screaming at one another. And, closer to the end of the movie, just when we think we are about to get a truly beautiful moment—a reconciliation—the movie has to pull the dumb, somebody-opens-the-door gag which completely stops the scene. Then there's the excess characters: Julie White exists for no purpose other than to drive Melanie Lynskey home from the bar one night; Jimmi Simpson plays a drip so mawkishly pathetic that I found myself looking to my watch. I understand the point of the character: he's supposed to represent to Miss Lynskey what might eventually become of her. It's not the intentions or the acting, it's the writing.Then there's the other thing that rubbed me raw. Laura Veirs is credited for writing the original score for this movie, but it's hard to appreciate her instrumental work since most of the soundtrack is riddled with about six or seven too many songs. Maybe it's a personal problem; I'm one of the few people of my generation (adult males under 30) who is not particularly interested in contemporary music. But if I saw one more walking scene with a bunch of overblown lyrics thumping away in the background, I was going to start pounding my forehead.Believe me when I tell you, I really regret having to stomp all over "Hello I Must Be Going." There is so much ambition in this movie and so many really talented people involved. And even though I've faulted screenwriter Koskoff's work, she does show promise: a bold story and some bursts of really good dialogue. As somebody who has been on the set of an independent movie, I know how much hard work goes into making one. I know script changes are constantly being made; there's pressure to get everything done on schedule. And above all, I hate to put it down for the same reason I always hate giving negative reviews in general: I have to admit to a storyteller that I did not like the story they were telling. But I have to be absolutely honest: "Hello I Must Be Going" did not register very much emotional impact with me. Again, in the beginning and at the end, there is a lot of punch, the middle of the movie really drags for me.

This film screened at the 2012 New Hampshire Film Festival in Portsmouth, NH and several of the people I spoke to after really enjoyed it. I will admit that I felt it was slow at times. However, for anyone who has been through a divorce or knows someone who has been through a divorce, this is a fun film that I think can help a lot of people. I saw myself in some of the characters and I saw my friends and family. Two friends who saw the movie said that one scene came right out of their own lives after they got divorced. So while it may not be for everyone, I highly recommend this film to people who can relate to the material and think they might enjoy seeing the difficult subject of divorce treated with intelligence, humanity and humor.

Hello I Must Be Going is not a glamorous Hollywood film. Not that I don't enjoy the big budget blockbusters every once in a while, but this film was a refreshing departure. There are no flashy cuts or fast-paced action sequences, because it is attempting to tell a far more intimate story. The film is not rushing you along with plot. When the characters talk, they are talking about their inner most fears and desires.The subject of the film, whose life we are let into, is Amy Minksy. A character, who if we met in real life, we would want to walk up to her and just give her a hug. When we first meet Amy, we find out that she is a woman in her mid-thirties, has just been divorced, and is living with her parents at home again. To call her depressed would be wrong, she seems more to me like a person who is stuck, not knowing what direction to go in for the rest of her life. She is slightly assisted in finding her way through the newfound love/lust she gets from 19-year-old Jeremy. An actor, who hates acting on stage, but likes to pretend he is gay in his real world life. They are the perfect couple for each other, and yet the worst, because at any minute the families could find out about their affair, and cause much embarrassment for the two families and trouble in a certain business venture.This film shows us Amy's life, in all of her moments of loneliness, happiness, embarrassment, lust, and so on. And the great thing about the film is it doesn't try to sugar coat anything. The movie feels more real than most I've seen. All the characters that surround Amy have hopes and dreams. You get the impression that everyone has some sort of secret, the audience is just only aware of Amy's. And the most interesting and successful sequences of the film are when those desires are exposed, causing conflicts for the other characters, as it would in real life. All of the actors do a fantastic job of making their characters feel real. And I can't imagine it to have been too difficult for the actors, since the screenwriter seems to know every detail of every character's personal life story, without abruptly stating it in dialog. The script is brilliantly subtle in that way.I think that some people might have a hard time sitting through Hello I Must Be Going, because it is in a lot of ways very different from the usual. The story is told to the audience in quiet conversation. And sometimes, the film can feel repetitive and claustrophobic. There are multiple scenes when Amy and Jeremy go off to have their affair in a different place than before. Although we do learn new information about them in every scene, they still seem to be stuck doing the same things over and over again, in different positions and different places, but really the same thing. Also the movie is told through Amy's eyes, so we only see the things she sees and does, so mainly Jeremy. Amy is unemployed and Jeremy is just a kid, so both individuals don't do much. While I understand the movie is about Amy and should be mostly from her point of view, I wish the film opened up a bit more and explored some of the other characters in their own world. In one particular scene, we learn about Amy's mother Ruth, who is played by the wonderful Blythe Danner. Through most of the film, Amy and Ruth are at each other's throats. But there is a moment they have of understanding one another near the end of the film, which was my favorite scene of the movie, particularly because Blythe Danner and Melanie Lynskey are so fantastic in the scene, and I must say in the entire film.The ending felt a little sudden. Characters continuously ask Amy throughout the film what she wants to do with her life, but she never has an answer. And by the end, she still doesn't have an answer. But she seems okay with that. We don't get the perfect happy ending for Amy, but we get the sense that she is happy. Perhaps that is the point the film is trying to make, sometimes you just don't know what you want to do in life. Maybe the point of the film is it doesn't matter what you do as long as your happy, which Amy seemed to be for a brief moment with Jeremy. Still her plan for what she wants to do by the end of the film doesn't seem like much of an improvement over her plan at the beginning of wearing the same shirt and watching the Marx Brothers everyday. The entire film, we watch Amy through all of her misery, it would have been nice to give her that moment of: "she's going to be all right." Well, she seems perfectly content. So let's just hope she can figure it out.