“Go see it and see for yourself why you shouldn’t go see it.” — Samuel Goldwyn

Sally Field, who was so good as the union factory worker in “Norma Rae,” showed her comedic skills in the 1991 “Soap Dish” and has always, with few missteps, delivered solid work.

This week, she has somehow, in her 60s, stumbled into the sweaty hands of schlock director Michael Showalter (“Wet Hot American Summer” 2001), who offered her this: “Hello, My Name is Doris,” a role for which she is way below her Oscar winner pay grade.

Here we get a borderline lost soul, a mentally challenged older woman, who even in her youth was on her way to a lonely end, but somehow survived aided by the care and comfort of strangers. Oh no, sorry, that’s Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner’s “Lady in a Van,” and it had Maggie Smith.

Our Doris is our old friend Sally Field, who lives on Staten Island in the house where she was born and spent her life taking care of her dying mother. Mom, like the crazy 1940s’ Collyer Brothers, was a hoarder of everything: newspapers, old lamps, furniture found on the street, one broken ski (“A one legged man could use it.”), thousands of magazines and dozens of moldy duck and soy packets taken from Chinese restaurants (“They keep.”).

Fearing, as we do, that she’s coming unglued, her brother (the great Stephen Root) and his wife want her to sell the house and move on to where?

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Doris is no dummy. Armed with a business school diploma and now in her 60s, she works as an accountant in an upscale tech company populated by millennials and progressive Silicon Valley types. She’s so out of place in this Facebook collection, it seems as though she came with the building in a lease deal.

Soon it becomes apparent that she’s here because writer and director Showalter couldn’t hook her up with the sweet, nice, young art director if she were bagging groceries at Hannaford. It’s a transparent conceit.

Doris, who has clearly jumped over the fence of OCD to borderline kleptomania, picks up lamps in the streets and steals pencils out of people’s backpacks in the elevator.

I know we’re supposed to see her as the lovable but whacky lady next door, who gardens in green gloves and waves at the mailman, but this is a younger Damon Runyon’s “Apple Annie.”

Her daily go-to-work wardrobe is a series of Halloween costumes like those worn by contestants on “The Price is Right.”

Poor Sally. It would be funny on television’s “Two Broke Girls.” Here it’s sad. It’s like seeing Dame Maggie Smith in a Lady GaGA wedding dress.

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Doris “meets cute” her handsome young art director boss John (Max Greenfield “The Big Short”) in a crowded elevator and falls in love.

In one scene after another, Showalter shamefully promises an improbable May-to-next-December hook up via a series of pop-up fantasy scenes of her and her young lover making out. It quickly becomes ludicrous and embarrassing and not a little creepy.

There were a few moments when I thought maybe Showalter would go interestingly rogue. When her young fantasy lover goes out with his real girlfriend (“Two Broke Girls” star Beth Behrs), Doris stalks them, watching them through shop windows in a series of painful mugging grimaces as her heart breaks. For a moment, it gives us the feeling that Doris might morph into “Sunset Boulevard’s” Norma Desmond and dump her fantasy lover in a swimming pool. Now, I’d pay to see that movie.

Ultimately, Doris is still Sally Field, full of talent and experience, and if you’re a loyal fan, you’ll find something here to love, I promise you.

J.P. Devine is a former stage and screen actor and the author of “Will Write For Food.”


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