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Hedges has a gift for bringing us into the lives of characters in even the briefest sketches with the strong support of an outstanding cast. It is a joy to see veterans like Elaine May, Sandra Oh, and Judith Light as three very different mothers fully inhabiting their roles with such immediacy and precision. Seeing so many of them at work and with family or a support group grounds the film by giving them dimensionality. Oh is especially affecting as a very concerned mother in one scene and then as a participant in an AA meeting in another. We first see a home health care aide (Daphne Rubin-Vega, another stand-out) as a concerned professional, calling in a doctor for a reluctant woman showing signs of COVID. Seeing her then very worried about her own family member, speaking in her first language, gives her character an authenticity far beyond what we might expect from her brief screen time. 

Bridget (Alison Pill) is a teacher trying to do her best with remote learning. Rosemary DeWitt and Ron Livingston are parents trying to act as breadwinner, babysitter, tutor, home school facilitator, and playdate all at once. They talk to Bridget about their son over Zoom. “Keeping them engaged seems like a win,” she tells the exhausted parents, as she explains an assignment to write about what her students are experiencing. And the parents learn through their son’s school essay that they have not been as effective at protecting him from the pressures of the shutdown as they had hoped. Then we see Bridget with her three brothers, trying to protect their ailing mother (Light) from her children's painful arguments about politics. 

Throughout the film there are parents worried about children and children worried about parents, the physical and technological distance only a small part of the gulf that too often separates us from what we wish we could heal. In the movie’s most heartbreaking scene, Oh understands a moment before we do that her son (a superb Jin Ha) is in severe distress. She tries to be reassuring and calm, but her eyes reveal her panic and devastation. The most transactional interaction is between a sex worker and a client who just wants an escape from his work at a hospital. They abandon anonymity and make a brief but genuine connection. This provides context and balance for the scenes where a character refuses to or is unable to engage. As fragile and complicated and frustrating as the efforts are, they are vital, they are meaningful, and they are sustaining.

A character we see only briefly in the film says that there are only two kinds of love, too much and too little. On reflection, he says, he has learned that “too much” is his favorite kind. “The Same Storm” brims with that kind of love. It may be too much to protect us from the pain of missing connections, but it is enough to remind us that it is not just the storm that connects us, but the ability to tell our stories and see ourselves reflected in the stories we see.

Now playing in theaters. 

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