A Good Person

Much like with Don't Worry Darling last year, Florence Pugh proves that she can shine even when the material she's been given isn't the best.  Written and Directed by Zach Braff, A Good Person is a contrived and heavy-handed melodrama that hits us over the head with what it wants to say, all the while giving us actors who are much too good for the roles they're playing, and could probably do them in their sleep.  Sure, it's great to see pros like Pugh, Morgan Freeman and Molly Shannon sharing the screen.  You just wish Braff could have upped his end of the bargain, and given them real characters.

This is a well-meaning movie that wears its heart on its sleeve, but that heart is mechanical, and built out of bits and pieces from other movies.  The movie even opens and ends with the reliable standby in which whenever Morgan Freeman is in a sentimental drama, he has to act as the narrator.  He plays Daniel, a sad-faced man with more than a few personal demons who narrates in that wise voice of his as he studies his elaborate model train set.  In that voice over, he tells us that in a model train town, you can control what happens, unlike the messy and often unpredictable real world.  It's that kind of obvious dialogue that spells out exactly what a character is thinking that sinks a movie like this.  It's like the movie thinks its wiser than it is, and has to explain itself to us.

After this opening, we're introduced to Allison (Pugh), who has a great pharmaceutical job and a loving fiance (Chinaza Uche), only to lose it all when she's driving into the city with her future sister and brother in law to look at wedding dresses for her.  There's a car accident when Allison is briefly distracted by her phone, and she is the only survivor.  Flash forward a year later, and Allison is now strung out on pain pills, unemployed, and living with her mom (a very good Molly Shannon), who is clearly on her last leg of patience with her daughter.  She walked away from the man she loved, and despite telling herself constantly that the accident wasn't her fault, drowns her sorrows in booze and pills.  Daniel just happens to be the father of her former fiance, and blamed her for the deaths of his two other children who were in the car with her.  He is now the reluctant guardian of a teenage girl named Ryan (Celeste O'Connor).

In a twist of fate only a screenwriter could dream up, both Allison and Daniel end up at the same recovery meeting.  Turns out Daniel has an alcoholic history, and despite being sober for ten years, the events of the past year have been testing him, and he keeps on pulling out that bottle of liquor he keeps stashed in the back of the cabinet, and staring ruefully at it.  The two wind up striking up a friendship, which happens a bit too neatly and conveniently, but not as convenient as the relationship that eventually grows between Allison and the teenaged Ryan, which never once rings true, and leads to a climactic moment when the two go into the city together that is so contrived and forced, I was almost shaking my head.  The screenplay tries to tie so many characters, problems, histories and painful pasts together into one neat package that the movie just feels overly thought out.

A Good Person is the kind of melodrama that is filled top to bottom with forced emotion and dialogue that reads like it's either spelling things out, or just doesn't sound like a normal conversation to begin with.  The way the movie constantly uses profanity in its dialogue is especially jarring.  It's not that I was offended, it just never once sounds like people talking to begin with.  It starts to sound like Braff was getting paid extra by the amount of four-letter words he could slip into the script.  Add to this the way the movie tackles issues like pill addiction, alcoholism, abusive fathers, absent fathers and teenage sex in such a simple way.  Apparently, these are people who are obsessed with their own problems, and talk about nothing about how much in pain they are.  You want these people to try getting out of their homes, and maybe do something to take their minds off.  

But that's not this movie.  This is a movie that is built on Hollywood sentiment and fortune cookie dialogue about turning your life around.  The truth is, there are some scenes here where the actors get to shine, and you can see the kind of film they were trying to make.  It's the script that betrays them, laying on one false, heavy-handed, and obvious scene on top of another to the point that the talent just gets crushed under it all.  As the climactic moments played out, not only could I not figure out some of the motivations of the characters, I had to wonder what certain people were even doing in the present scene.  Naturally, things wrap up once again with another warm voice over by Freeman, who once again spells out everything in the final moments.

A Good Person calls out for an honest and truthful touch, and Braff has built this screenplay entirely out of cliches about people who need help.  And when someone does finally start to get help, we don't even get to see it happen, except in a montage.  That's the kind of movie this is.  Pity that.  

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