Susan Sarandon, Aubrey Plaza Drama

There’s a high level of difficulty in what Susan Sarandon pulls off with apparent ease in The Accompanist. As Sylvia, the foster parent of a young girl, she plays a character who is a little wacky and indulgent, kind and at times wise but with emotional baggage of her own. And Sarandon turns what might have been a blueprint for sentimentality and clichés into a believable, idiosyncratic, very present individual.

In fact, all the performances in this feature debut from director Zach Woods, best known as an actor in comedies including the HBO series Silicon Valley, are grounded and sharp. They are the strongest element of a story about nine-year-old Emily (Everly Carganilla), whose grandfather and guardian (Kevyn Morrow) is showing serious signs of dementia. Aubrey Plaza, in a small role, plays an inept social worker who hauls Emily out of her house to Sylvia’s in a nearby New Jersey town.

But Woods, who wrote the screenplay with Brandon Gardner, tries to infuse a deft drama with a wisp of magical realism, which is more problematic. It’s not that those two elements can’t coexist, but that one part works far better than the other here.

Emily’s story is gripping from the start, as she worries about the loving grandfather who can’t take care of her safely anymore. A near-accident as he drives on a train track, a scene of tense efficiency, alarms even Emily. Alerted by a school nurse, Plaza’s character, Sarah, arrives at the house and, in what she later admits was a panicked moment, brusquely drags Emily to her car and takes her to Sylvia.

Visually, the film finds a smart balance between the real and fantastic, with cinematography that is crisp and at times just a bit brighter than reality. The production design gives Sylvia’s house, filled with photographs and tchotchkes, an old-fashioned, almost storybook look.

And Sylvia herself is as layered as her cluttered home. When Emily refuses to enter the house, Sylvia just lets her stay outside then finds her in a playground, where they spend the night. She smokes and pulls pranks. She conveniently forgets to send Emily to school. You have to suspend logic to believe in much of this plot, even the realistic elements. The well-meaning but remarkably inept Sarah never clarified whether she or Sylvia would enroll Emily in school. And we see, long before the supposedly astute Sylvia, just when Emily is likely to run away. But Sylvia and Emily develop a charming rapport, and their scenes together have enough wit and ease to make the story work for a while.

It’s too bad the rocky screenplay spends so much time pointing toward a tragedy in Sylvia’s past before revealing it. That secret is hinted at in the film’s opening scene: a ballet dancer in what is clearly some medical institution performs frantic movements. Here and in later scenes, the dancer Emma Farnell-Watson captures the agony and pain of the character, who we eventually learn is Sylvia’s late daughter, Nadia.

Nadia’s story, used subtly at first, says a lot about why Sylvia might have wanted to foster a child without having to spell that out. Yet the more we learn about her and Sylvia’s grief, the more overwrought the screenplay becomes, and such subtlety vanishes. There are too-neat parallels, as a frequent nervous neck twitch of Emily’s becomes a triggering echo of Nadia’s anorexia.

The fantasy element arrives fairly late in the film but is bluntly foreshadowed. The story begins at Halloween and Emily’s grandfather reads her a story about witches. And while the magical realism is the film’s most unusual strand, it is also the weakest. The various scenes detached from reality start out as enigmatic but become head-spinning and confounding. When Sylvia and Emily fly through the night sky, there is a hint it might be a dream. And later in the story when Sylvia thinks of Nadia in dance class, a scene that plays out on screen, it appears Emily can share Sylvia’s memories or dreams or whatever they are. The film strains to open the door to magic, and those episodes land with a thud. 

The Accompanist has some lovely moments. Carganilla makes Emily heartbreaking in the way she finally longs to stay with Sylvia, trying to learn to play the piano to please her, slowly picking out a touching, surprisingly apt phrase from Porgy and Bess. But as it unravels, this ambitious film becomes too precious for its own good.