Hello, My Name is Doris screened at SXSW to very good reviews and won a SXSW Film Festival Audience Award. I haven’t seen any news about it being picked up for distribution, but I want to mention the film just in case. I’ll keep an eye out on streaming services as well as for potential theater distribution.
The film is a mix of both drama and comedy. There’s a bit of a clip from a comic scene in the film on Vimeo:
There should be regular trailers for the film at some point. I’ll keep an eye out for that, too.
Sally Field stars as Doris. The story is about a woman in her 60s who, after the death of her mother, falls for her much younger co-worker (Max Greenfield).
It’s rare for a woman of Sally Field’s age (68) to get the lead in a film. When Variety interviewed her after the screening at SXSW, they asked her about that. She answered,
They don’t write roles for women anyway, and they certainly don’t write roles for women of age and women of color.
There’s certainly an audience for films about women, as film after film proves. One of the things that appeals to me about the film is that Doris uses Facebook to stalk the younger man, once again showing that elders are not as technologically inept as pop wisdom would have us believe.
Field described the character:
It’s such a unique character. She’s just the strangest person. I loved the fact that it was an older woman. But we never really talk about age. It’s really more about everybody trying to move on with their lives and how hard it is to do that. No matter what stage of life we’re in, everybody’s the same.
Co-written by Michael Showalter and Laura Terruso and directed by Michael Showalter, the film also includes Wendi McLendon-Covey, Natasha Lyonne, Beth Behrs, Stephen Root, Peter Gallagher and Tyne Daly.