A Good Person Review: An Imperfect Story of Tragedy

A Good Person has its strong and powerful moments, however many of them seem to be ripped away from the audience by the end. Still, Pugh delivers a fantastic and raw performance.

A Good Person Review: A Story of Grief, Tragedy, and Addiction

Tragedy… it can come into our lives at any moment, damage us and those around us to indescribable degrees, send us down dark spirals of our own making, having us so loss in despair we even forget how we got to rock bottom in the first place. What’s makes it all so tragic is that no matter what, whenever it happens it’s when we least expect.

 

Zach Braff’s A GOOD PERSON explores the devastating effects of tragedy and the grief that always follows it with Allison (Florence Pugh) a young woman who is living in bliss with her career and engagement to Nathan (Chinaza Uche), but her life suddenly falls apart following her involvement in a fatal accident that ends up taking the lives of Nathan’s sister Molly and her husband. Allison can’t quite cope with her guilt even as she becomes dependent on opioids, ends her engagement, quits a job, and finds herself moving back in with her mom.

Finding herself in rock bottom, Allison attempts to ask for help, only to stumble into an AA meeting where here would-be father-in-law Daniel (Morgan Freeman) invites her in, the unlikely relationship that blossoms between the two helps Allison live a life worth living.

Zach Braff’s writing can be really challenging, as structurally he doesn’t necessarily tread on often beaten paths when it comes to stories of tragedy, grief, and addiction. He dares audiences to question morality and even Allison’s likeability as a protagonist as the first act is when we find her in rock bottom: desperate for more pills, attempting to bribe medical professionals, blackmail a friend and embarrassing herself for where she is at this moment in her life, dragging herself into bars in the AM and confronted by high school losers who mock her the same way she used to mock them, thinking herself better for the life she used to have.

This is only the beginning of her self-destruction, and it’s the nuance Florence Pugh gives to Allison’s struggles that makes this such a staggering performance to watch, with every mistake made along the journey Pugh also gives Allison so much humanity and fragility given what she’s done and who she has become, we’re compelled to root for her because we understand what she once had and who she was, before she eventually became so defined by this horrific tragedy.

Pugh is a powerhouse in this, and her performance is not only a testament for her versatility, where it feels Allison could absolutely shatter into a million pieces at any moment, but also a testament to Braff’s great writing, making this an immensely grounded, almost uncomfortably so, character study.

Where Braff also subverts structural expectations in such a story is in how Daniel receives her, we hear from other characters how angry he is, how he’s always blamed Allison, but as soon as he sees her attempting to join his AA meeting, he kindly pleads her to not run away, believing she found the one he is at for a reason, and selfishly: as he himself is attempting to cope for the grief of the same exact event, he invites her to join him, to not run away and not be afraid to ask for the help she so clearly needs.

This gives way for many interesting interactions between the two, as Allison and Daniel attempt to be there for each other while working through their issues, Allison coming to terms with her guilt with the help of the man who just so happens to be the father of the woman she blames herself for killing, and Daniel accepting his mistakes as a father in yesteryears, brought about by constant drinking, an addiction that resurfaced after the accident.

Morgan plays this man with a great balance of whimsy and edge: he’s pragmatic in his views of things, but also gets terribly emotional when his granddaughter Ryan (Celeste O’Connor) now left in his care, comes into question. The same man who has an inspiringly large miniature town in his basement and paints the figures himself, is the same one who points a gun and threatens the life of a teenage boy he catches sleeping with Ryan.

Daniel failed so much as a father early in his life he barely knows how to be one now with Ryan, especially with the age gap between the two. Which is how Allison sees herself making amends for the accident and the death of Molly, she’s afraid of a confrontation with Ryan, but once the latter invites the for coffee, there is yet another intriguing relationship that begins developing, one that Allison isn’t quite sure about, she is rather scared of what might come of it, even falling back into her pills due to the pressure and the secrets Ryan shares with her about Nathan, Ryan’s uncle, who she keeps in touch with.

Eventually, this is a relationship that despite promising, begins sending the movie on quite a few distracting tangents, to the point where we, and the script, almost lose sight of whose story we’re actually following. The individual character narratives don’t necessarily bleed into one another entirely: what at first was the story of a woman struggling with her grief braving into a connection with a man doing the same, then brings in a teenager, also a victim of the same grief, but because teenagers don’t necessarily know how to process such complicated feelings: the narrative and its goals become a bit vague and the story is not so clear cut from then now.

Ryan is someone who never really processed the loss of her mother until Allison came into her life. She lost focus at school, begins to suck at soccer, and thanks to her grandfather she feels stifled in her growth through these formative years, but once Allison comes in she can finally feel anger, she finally has someone to channel her feelings into. But she is also curious, intuitive and even feels pity of Allison, eventually interfering and manipulating a “fix” for Allison’s problems in ways that feel intrusive, but once more, demonstrate Braff’s writing capabilities to challenge our ideas on character morality and the processing of such complicated feelings.

For a while this is the film’s biggest strength: it’s how he does not give us, or his characters, easy answers or solutions, everything and everyone operate in shades of gray. That is until a trip to New York city goes awry, and the film begins losing its nuance, it already had troubles tying every narrative thread together, and a few supporting characters definitely never had layers to begin with, such as Allison’s mom Diane (Molly Shannon).

But what’s worse is that what was once a film that dealt with the complications of grief, the complexity of addiction and dare to ask us to question our ideas and notions of good and bad and “what would I do?”, instead as it heads into the third act becomes a story that starts to tell us how to feel, and those complications become rather simpler, layers dissipate and the depth that was once there keeping us on the edge of our seats as we attempted to figure out these characters and understand why the spoke how they spoke, acted how they acted and even more importantly, reacted to the world and people around them in the way they did… it mostly disappears and with it, lot of the story begins to feel rather weightless. Undoing not all, but quite a bit of the good will Braff had been building up until that point.

The point of no return is a confrontation between Allison and Daniel after a party-gone-wrong scene that is heart-shattering and opens the doors for a great climax, but it’s from here that the film fails to quite stick the landing, as we barely even see the two characters together again after this point. This is where the film demonstrates how Braff’s strong writing isn’t necessarily met by his direction. Where the film feels close to his heart in its emotions, themes, and characters, as they even shot the film in his hometown where he grew up.

It structurally struggles converging all its major story points and despite its grounded realism the film doesn’t quite feel like it is distinct in trying to tackle such complex themes and emotions. It’s admirable in its intentions, and feels personal in the absolute best ways, but there just isn’t the certainty this voice is the best one to tell such a story, and there wouldn’t be a way to guess who the director behind bringing such a strong script to life was.

A GOOD PERSON sees Florence Pugh shine with earnest emotion in one of her finest performances, wrapped in Braff’s bravely, if imperfectly, told challenging journey complex emotions & people. It can feel too busy as its themes of addiction, grief, coping, healing and so much in-between eventually don’t feel they’re explored quite in-depth as they promise.

FINAL GRADE: B

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About A Good Person 

Allison is a young woman with a wonderful fiance, a blossoming career, and supportive family and friends. However, her world crumbles in the blink of an eye when she survives an unimaginable tragedy, emerging from recovery with an opioid addiction and unresolved grief. In the following years, she forms an unlikely friendship with her would-be father-in-law that gives her a fighting chance to put her life back together and move forward.

A Good Person hits theaters on March 24th.