---

In another romantic comedy she’d be discarded pretty quickly, no traces to be found. Not long into I’ll Take You There (1999), actress turned filmmaker Adrienne Shelly’s second feature movie as a director, Bernice (Ally Sheedy) is set up by her good friend Lucy (Shelly) to go on a blind date with her sad-sack brother, Bill (Reg Rogers). Bill isn’t looking for love. Lucy just wants to get him out of the house, and figures Bernice, whom he briefly met in college and had gotten along with well enough, might be a good start. Bill is three months removed from a breakup (the wife, played by Lara Harris, dumped him over the phone after clearing her side of the closet and skipping town), and is understandably so obviously distraught about the whole thing still that he’s practically commanded to take time off work by a boss tired of the moping and the absent-minded fuck-ups on the job. 

Bernice doesn’t know all this when she agrees to meet Bill at a bar. She opens up like her date’s eyes were gentle and open rather than somewhere else and rumbling. With her kooky hairdo and tendency to fill silences with mile-a-minute chatter, Bernice is coded as a variation on the very briefly seen “quirky woman” you’d spend about a minute or so with in another movie as a weirdo our romantic-comedy hero has one disastrous date with — in a lineup of many that are all positioned as comic relief — before finding the new love of his life.

Shelly is aware we might be thinking this; the film loves subverting expectations. After Bill, mopey and looking ready to burst into tears throughout the date, very rudely voices his disinterest in Bernice with an unfounded personal attack, she doesn’t simply go away, as she might in a different movie. She comes back a little while later, visibly gripped by a personal dark place, and tries maneuvering into Bill’s life by increasingly showing up places where he is unannounced. This isn’t because she’s attracted to him. It’s that she feels he’s robbed her of something, almost, and has developed a compulsion to not let him get away scot free. By fashioning herself into an unavoidable physical presence, Bill will have to seriously deal with the emotional consequences of his casual cruelty. 

But this can only get out of hand. When Bill announces he’s driving the four hours to where his ex is living with her new boyfriend to win her back, Bernice invites herself for at least a portion of the ride. A pointed gun ensures he can’t say no. They climb into her purple Mercury, make a brief stop at a boutique Bernice brazenly robs, and hit the road, where the most memorable pitstop isn’t the inevitable moment when Bill pleads with his wife but the one where the duo stays the night at the house of Bernice’s wacky grandmother (Alice Drummond) and her sweet-natured boyfriend (Alan North), who touchingly recounts how he pined for the woman for more than 68 years before life’s circumstances finally allowed for a coupling.

Bernice’s unpredictability unsurprisingly begins not only to pull Bill out of his one-track-minded misery but also win him over. He’s impressed by her secret tuba-playing talent reluctantly trotted out at Grandma’s; he admires the boldness when he learns Bernice had left her ex-fiancé at the altar because she knew she’d be making the biggest mistake of her life. 

Shelly isn’t the kind of filmmaker to define Bernice mostly — as is so often the norm with a male director working with this sort of scattered, “oddball” character — as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl type whose instabilities are more charming than they are too destructive to be forgivable, existing mostly to teach our male lead to have some fun, loosen up a bit. Bernice really is unsteady, for reasons the movie will get to later on. She’s seemingly bound for a snap even worse than the one we see here. 

But Shelly doesn’t judge her, frame her shakiness and odd behaviors as one-dimensionally bizarro. She delicately reveals bits and pieces that evince the ways Bernice has gotten to where she is now. Bernice soon comes into focus as the film’s most rounded and affecting character. Though it’s easy to wish, a little, that Shelly had played the Bernice part herself (she has so much presence as an actor that even her all-too-brief work as Bill’s sister has a knock-you-down luminousness), Sheedy is still very good in a complicated part that could have easily been overtaken by its caprices. 

I’ll Take You There never feels less than empathetic. Its characters’ idiosyncrasies never appear like overworked ploys for comedy but genuine ones reacting to life’s turbulence and frequent harshness. I appreciated, too, that Bill’s often reckless disregard for others while working through his shit is never implicitly excused as a harmless extension of his sorrow. The movie concludes somewhat happily — a bit cockeyed. But the film’s ultimate aim doesn’t seem to rest in telling a feel-good love story per se. I’ll Take You There extols the simple power of compassion in general. You never know where hearing someone out could take you.