“The Meddler”

Rated PG-13

***

Opens today at Dole Cannery Stadium 18 and Kahala 8

The first time that Marnie Minervini opens her mouth in “The Meddler,” you might wish it were the last. Half of an insistently winning, hopelessly irresistible mother-daughter duet, this buttinsky New Jersey widow (Susan Sarandon) puts the “awl” into call and the “awk” into talk and works both your nerves and ears as she does. Having recently moved to Los Angeles, Marnie has turned her cellphone into an umbilical cord that keeps her hooked to her daughter, Lori (Rose Byrne). “The Meddler” is a tear-drizzled comedy, but I understand if it sounds like a horror movie.

It’s a little of both, in truth, with some family melodrama and sweet romance thrown in.

Affable, earnest and humanly scaled, “The Meddler” is the kind of entertainment that the studios used to supply by the boatload and that now tends to show up on the small screen. Its emphasis on a mother-and-daughter relationship, in particular, brings to mind maternal melodramas like the glorious weepie “Stella Dallas” (1937), about a woman who asks her wealthy estranged husband to finish raising their daughter so that the girl can live like the people in movies.

The difference being that “The Meddler” is agreeably (unusually) optimistic about human relationships, despite the melancholy edging its comedy. Marnie is the biggest source of the humor, and Sarandon plays her beautifully in every shade of sunshine. One of those relentlessly “on” people who’s always on the go, Marnie is always talking (including on her cell behind the wheel) and always doing, and always talking while doing. There’s compulsiveness to her meddlesomeness. Marnie doesn’t just call Lori, she does so repeatedly, babbling away as if each call were another clause in a sentence without end (“anyway”).

Writer-director Lorene Scafaria leads with her laughs. Marnie enters yakking and keeps the motor running, including in voice-over.

The patter is inane, funny, lifelike, and Sarandon’s Jersey intonations give it a comic topspin. Scafaria seeds these passages with information — Marnie’s dead husband, Joe, was the love of her life — and you can see the narrative machinery in action. But part of what makes the movie work is its unshowy realism, including yammer that isn’t the stuff of dramatic setup or tension, but instead resembles the churn of random observations and pointless asides. The sort that swirls through your head and you sometimes share with someone when you’re unpacking groceries, making dinner or just calling to chat — only funnier.

The story begins to catch up to Marnie’s accelerated rhythms when Lori splits for New York to work on a pilot she’s written, leaving her mom alone. Marnie copes with this separation in her usual fashion, calling Lori amid visits to the mall (cue the Crate & Barrel product placements) and visits to Lori’s dogs, Lori’s friends and Lori’s shrink. Marnie has started to see the therapist (Amy Landecker in a quick, deadpan turn) at Lori’s urging, though mostly she seems to go as a way to insinuate herself even more deeply into her daughter’s life. It’s no wonder that Marnie seems like a smother-mother who’s one 911 call away from a restraining order; no wonder too that she seems lonely.

It would be easy to put Marnie on the couch, to assume that she’s neurotic rather than, you know, friendly, and that she talks a lot only to fill the silences or because the quiet might bring on the grief and self-reflection. But she’s plenty self-knowing already, thanks, and Sarandon shows you the self-awareness hovering behind Marnie’s smile and trembling in her pauses. Still, there is work to be done, a life to live, and, in a sense, the movie is a coming-of-later-age story in which a mother learns how to cut the cord one funny, poignant snip at a time and discovers herself in the process. In this, Marnie receives help from a much younger mother, Jillian (Cecily Strong), and a new friend, Zipper (J.K. Simmons), who each peel back layers.

The same goes for the movie, which has a humble, utilitarian visual style, except that everyone looks really pretty — Sarandon, Byrne and Simmons included. Part of this is the quality of the Los Angeles light, which here has none of its sunshine-and-noir harshness, but instead gives the characters an appealing glow, a glow that after a while feels like adoration.

When Marnie looks at Lori — and Lori looks at Marnie — you are watching two people who, despite the nonsense, care for each other deeply. You see their happiness and you share in it, too, because in “The Meddler,” Scafaria is holding up that softening filter through which each of us sees the funny, maddening, indispensable people with whom we laugh, mourn and, if we’re lucky, find love.