Year:  2023

Director:  Zach Braff

Rated:  MA

Release:  April 20, 2023

Distributor: Kismet

Running time: 128 minutes

Worth: $13.99
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth

Cast:
Florence Pugh, Morgan Freeman, Molly Shannon, Celeste O’Connor, Zoe Lister-Jones

Intro:
… manages to eke out a good experience off the strength of its visceral lead performances and its eventual, if still rocky, ability to wring proper catharsis out of occasionally screwface-inducing developments.

Zach ‘Sarah Silverman’s burping sound’ Braff has a new film out. Given his status as one of the most divisive filmmakers in the American indie scene, and having codified the infamous Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope with his equally-infamous debut Garden State, that sentence would usually be the only thing that needs to be added into consideration. If you can vibe with his Macklemore levels of earnestness behind the camera, you should be fine with his latest; if not, then you will probably continue to be offside. However, even with its flaws, there is material A Good Person that requires witnessing.

Digging once again into his penchant for stories of broken people struggling to pick up the pieces, A Good Person is the character study of Allison (Florence Pugh), an Oxy addict stuck in the clutches of her trauma and dependencies. Pugh has a history of elevating weak material – Don’t Worry Darling and Black Widow – and her performance here is a contender for best to date. Every spiralled-out descent, every fevered withdrawal shake, every pained and frequently venomous interaction with others, shows her in prime form, embodying the character’s psychological captivity, much as she did in Midsommar.

Not that she’s left to carry this film alone; Morgan Freeman as Daniel, a grandfather whose grief is tied directly to Allison’s, delivers some of his best recent work. In contrast to the breezy safeness of his previous collab with Braff with Going in Style, here Freeman represents the burning red to contrast Allison’s grey-fading-into-black, in terms of his own ties to trauma and vices, which impact his outlook and actions. He’s occasionally shoved into rather mawkish ‘old man can’t relate to the kids these days’ moments, but even through that, he matches Pugh for authenticity in anguish.

Shame that Braff’s skill as a director of actors far exceeds his ability as a storyteller and writer, especially. The inciting action for the plot is presented with all the lurching pathos of a driving safety PSA, and the following ruminations on self-medicating and other coping mechanisms suffer from the same lack of grace. It’s not so much beating a dead horse as it is grinding the horse into powder, snorting a line of the stuff, looking directly into the camera and then shouting “don’t do horse powder” right into the lens.

Between Braff’s discomfort with letting the audience naturally pick up on what isn’t exactly the most nuanced narrative, and the aura of self-satisfaction in some of the quips (“The opiate of the masses… is opium” is the kind of line that early drafts exist for), there’s an underlying smugness that cuts into the film’s emotional resonance, especially during the first act.

But even with that said, A Good Person still manages to eke out a good experience off the strength of its visceral lead performances and its eventual, if still rocky, ability to wring proper catharsis out of occasionally screwface-inducing developments.

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