There’s nothing romantic about the way that Stan (Kevin Bacon) and Cynthia (Kyra Sedgwick) first meet in “The Best You Can,” but the very idea of their chance encounter is. For years, writer/director Michael J. Weithorn has specialized in staging the opposite of meet cutes – perhaps “meet uglies” – when people from different worlds stumble into each other at their lowest moment. Whether it was on the Thomas Haden Church-Debra Messing series he created “Ned and Stacey” that centered on a marriage of convenience, or his debut feature “A Little Help” in which Jenna Fischer couldn’t know what to feel when her husband died after living under the weight that he was chronically unfaithful, it takes someone well outside a personal bubble to see clearly into it and in his latest, Stan and Cynthia cross paths only when the latter thinks there’s an intruder in her home. A call to Stan, an ex-cop who has found a steady paycheck with a neighborhood security firm, scares away any thieves, but he threatens to scare off Cynthia as well when first forgetting to announce he’s a security guard, leaving room for her to think he’s part of the break-in and after that clarification, he needs to use her bathroom for bladder issues he’s been having.
After it turns out that Cynthia’s a urologist, it may not be all that much of a surprise where this is leading, especially when Weithorn has the casting coup of enlisting one of Hollywood’s most famous married couples to play the leads. However, “The Best You Can” employs Bacon and Sedgwick’s natural chemistry towards a transcendent connection in myriad of ways when it isn’t only the odds against the college-educated doctor crossing paths with the cop any time in her regular routine that stands in the way of a relationship, but that at first it largely has to unfold over text messages after Stan offers to keep tabs on Cynthia’s place after the attempted robbery. Yet other electricity is at work as talk about the installation of a doorbell camera over smartphones turns to more personal matters and the two have more to chat about than they initially would think when Cynthia cares for her much-older husband Warren (Judd Hirsch), once a legal lion who has been humbled by a fading memory and signs of dementia, and Stan struggles to keep up with his daughter Sammi (Brittany O’Grady), who he wants to encourage in her floundering efforts at a career in music but she wants little part of him after the two lost touch at a critical moment in her youth.
Love is rarely at the top of anyone’s mind when there’s a real feeling that just getting through the day is taxing enough, but it’s generously shown throughout “The Best You Can” where characters all trying to do right by one another and usually go about it all wrong. An impressive supporting cast that includes Olivia Luccardi as a friend with benefits for Stan, Heather Burns as Warren’s daughter and Meera Rohit Kumbhani as a caretaker who comes to provide assistance in ways Cynthia couldn’t imagine help round out a world where people are want to be there for one another but don’t know exactly how, and the awkwardness of being vulnerable around someone else offers as many opportunities for laughs as they do heartbreak. Along with the fine writing and performances, Andrew Wonder’s cinematography accentuates the sense of being somewhere that feels real only slightly better when any darkness is countered by sharp, vivid colors and when ultimately “The Best You Can” is about letting light in, the film’s radiance as a whole is undeniable.
“The Best You Can” will screen again at the Tribeca Festival at the Village East on June 8th at 2:45 pm and June 9th at 2 pm and at the SVA Theatre on June 15th at 5:15 pm.