The Best You Can

The Geometry of Late Bloomers

The romantic comedy, in its industrial form, is usually a machine designed to smooth out the edges of human experience. It promises that if two beautiful people collide, the friction will eventually produce a diamond. But Michael J. Weithorn’s *The Best You Can* (2025) operates on a different, more fragile physics. It suggests that when two people collide late in life—carrying the heavy baggage of disappointed daughters, failing bodies, and fading spouses—the result isn't a diamond, but simply a little more room to breathe.

Reuniting real-life spouses Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick for the first time in two decades, the film is less a vehicle for their star power and more a study in the specific, unglamorous gravity of middle age. Weithorn, a veteran of the sitcom trenches (*The King of Queens*), abandons the laugh track for a quieter, more observational rhythm. He isn't interested in the spark of new love so much as the embers of survival.



Visually, the film is bathed in the harsh, artificial sodium glow of a sleepless New York. Bacon’s Stan Olszewski, a private security guard who patrols the wealthy enclaves of Brooklyn, exists in a world of shadows and blue light. Weithorn and cinematographer Andrew Wonder frame Stan in isolation—behind windshields, staring at monitors, separated from the life he protects. This visual language of partition effectively mirrors the internal state of Sedgwick’s Cynthia Rand. A buttoned-up urologist, she is trapped not by glass but by the suffocating reality of her marriage to Warren (Judd Hirsch), a brilliant intellectual giant now crumbling under the slow, cruel erosion of dementia.

The film’s "meet-cute" is aggressively anti-romantic: a botched break-in response that leads to a prostate exam. Yet, Weithorn uses this clinical intimacy to strip away the artifice usually required by the genre. There is no room for vanity when you are discussing enlarged organs or the terrifying loss of a partner’s mind. The chemistry between Bacon and Sedgwick is not the electric, performative heat of their youth; it is a worn-in, comfortable vernacular. They speak to each other in a shorthand of exhausted people who have finally found someone else who is also just trying to keep the lights on.



The narrative spine of the film, however, is not the romance, but the negotiation of decline. Judd Hirsch delivers a devastating performance as Warren, a man who knows he is disappearing. The tragedy isn't just his memory loss; it's Cynthia’s realization that she has become a caretaker to a history book that is losing its pages. The contrast between Warren’s fading past and Stan’s messy, unfulfilled present (highlighted by his strained relationship with his musician daughter, played by Brittany O'Grady) creates the film's emotional tension. Stan is a man of "potential" that curdled into regret, while Cynthia is a woman of "success" that has calcified into loneliness.



Ultimately, *The Best You Can* is a quiet rebellion against the idea that romance solves problems. The connection between Stan and Cynthia doesn't cure Warren’s dementia or fix Stan’s career failures. Instead, the film offers a more modest, humanistic verdict: that being witnessed by another person is its own form of salvation. Weithorn has crafted a film that feels like a long, late-night text message sent to anyone who feels they might have missed their window—a gentle reminder that even in the dim light of middle age, there is still enough visibility to be seen.