A Good Person review: Florence Pugh is stranded by an implausible story
Writer-director Zach Braff comes up well short with this odd blend of broad humor and deep tragedy
Film Reviews Florence Pugh
A Good Person doesn’t waste time. Its leading character Allison (Florence Pugh) is immediately presented as having a happy life that’s full of love and promise. Quickly, she’s involved in an accident that she survives but others don’t. Before long she’s hit rock bottom: she is unemployed and lives with her mother (Molly Shannon), she breaks up with her loving fiancé (Chinaza Uche), and she succumbs to opioid addiction. There’s an economy to the early goings that feels brisk but hints at storytelling problems, coming on like footnotes to the narrative instead of fully dramatized scenes.
Writer-director Zach Braff speeds through the setup to get to the meat of his film: the relationship between Allison and Daniel (Morgan Freeman). He’s a retired cop who’s been sober for years and has been affected by the same tragic accident that Allison survived. They run into each other by chance in an AA meeting and soon they are helping each other navigate their grief. Allison is trying to kick her opioid addiction while Daniel is raising his teenage granddaughter (Celeste O’Connor) on his own. Shenanigans ensue. Yes, you read that correctly. In presenting Allison and Daniel’s complicated lives, Braff resorts to implausible storylines and scenes full of histrionics. To break the high drama of this story of survival, he injects broad humor that unfortunately feels jarring and not organic. Comedy can come out of tragedy but not in this clashing manner.
A Good Person is all over the place; a mismatch of tones. One part of it is a serious drama about overcoming grief and forging a path forward in the aftermath of a tragedy. The other part is a comedy of manners about the hijinks that can arise when people of different generations try to live together. Neither part works. The drama is a cluster of scenes with bad dialogue and platitudes instead of actual pathos. The comedy comes in when it’s uncalled for, breaking whatever genuine emotion the actors worked hard to craft. Sometimes all of this happens within the same scene, causing whiplash.
To depict Allison’s addiction, Braff resorts not to one but two montages. Making the montages even more absurdly comical are the on-the-nose lyrics of the songs chosen. A Good Person tries to form many relationships using its coterie of characters. All of them end up being implausible, more a screenwriter’s concoction than anything based in reality. Furthermore, the casting of the film’s smaller roles is confusing. A scene that is supposed to be moving becomes odd when a famous face pops up, so the viewer is trying to figure out what they’re doing there instead of following the story. Other times a comedic actor adds to the atonality of the film by puncturing an otherwise dramatic scene with an inane joke.
Consequently, a few good actors are left stranded trying to make sense of this mess. Both Pugh and Freeman invest their characters with grounded emotions that do not register because the film keeps shifting tones and working against their performances. Pugh brings humor to her line readings; she does not need the jokes that the script has in spades. Freeman looks uncomfortable in the sitcom-like storyline about his character’s relationship with his granddaughter. He’s not a comedic actor and that’s exacerbated by giving him most of the broadest comedic scenes. Fortunately, when it’s just the two of them, they manage to finagle a few genuinely moving moments.
Not only does Braff have no command of the film’s tone as a writer, he does not manage to have a firm grasp on its rhythm as a filmmaker. He undercuts his actors’ performances. For example, in Pugh’s big confession scene, he keeps cutting away from her to record the reactions of the other actors around her. That lessens the payoff, showing a bunch of bemused faces instead of the actor who’s wringing real emotions. It’s another befuddling choice in a movie full of them.
Asking the question “what makes a good person” might have been an intriguing idea. However, in trying to come up with an answer, A Good Person ends up presenting an overwrought narrative that’s full of cliches that do not resonate.
47 Comments
odd blend of broad humor and deep tragedy~The A.V. Club
Now with 50% less humor!
Where the fun never starts!
And 50% less tragedy. It’s less like watching a beloved institution die and more like the time I walked into a K-Mart that evidently made cuts to cleaning staff and climate control.
Why do we keep letting Zach Braff direct movies?
BoJack Horseman was his apex. Not as an actor, as a self-aware person.
He drives a Prius, so you know he’s a good person!
It seems that we have to endure one every decade, so hopefully were paid up until the 2030s.
He’s directed 3 theatrical movies in 20 years plus two more for TV. So, we don’t really.
He is doing things no one has ever done. Think Q Tar, Sydney Pollack and Norman Lear = Zack Braff
Seriously. This review could have been “D-. It’s a Zach Braff movie, nuff said.”
I felt like an alien when everyone around me was raving about ‘Garden State’. I wanted someone to explain what there was to like about that film.
bad dialogue and platitudes instead of actual pathos- the A.V. Club
You had me at the Braffffff-ffffff-ffffff-fff.
Hard pass.
Sounds like Zach Braff should stick to what he’s good at. Namely: Zach Braff loves Zach Braff unconditionally.
I’m glad Braff and Pugh are no longer a thing. Was worried he was going to do to her career what Melissa McCarthy’s husband did to her’s.
That man simply must be stopped.
They didn’t make all that many movies in their time together.
No way this thing needed to be over 2 hours long.
The mo’ Braff the mo’ betta’!
Dammit KCS that’s not a thing people say and you know it! Stop trying to make it a thing!
But I had all these t-shirts made!
We we’re supposed to use that money for gas and you goddamn know it!
Man, even junky Flo-P is radiant.
FlorPu is quite funny. Tempted to just watch her scenes with Hailee Steinfeld from Hawkeye instead of this
I just rewatched the elevator fight scene. The bit where Kate slaps Yelena right in the face is gold.
*Loved* the Hawkeye Disney+ show.
I was not expecting to enjoy a show about freaking Hawkeye so much, but here we are.
Please let this be the first and last time Someone refers to her as “FlorPu”.
Like her Marvel sister? ScarJo?
Her face is as round as a bowling ball, yet I still find her attractive. Her face has good symmetry which scientists say is appealing.
LOL!
Hey there fuckwads, I’m a good person!This movie looks atrocious, and I’ll never see it, but at least it got me humming this song. So maybe there is good in the world.
Hashtag humble and blessed.
Mildly hot take: Garden State was a solid-to-good movie that had the enormous disadvantage of kickstarting a mini-genre of shitty twee films that made their inspiration look worse in retrospect. (Easy to look like you’re just abusing annoying tropes when everything in your film becomes a trope immediately after it appears in your film.) It was, however, also a film that was obviously made by a first-time filmmaker who did not yet have full grasp of how to hone his craft. He also came up on Scrubs, which did manage to change tones between broad comedy and outright tragedy, sometimes on a dime. Unfortunately, Braff seems to have taken the wrong lessons from these experiences: that audiences will forgive shoddy filmmaking technique in something not as novel as his first movie (they won’t), and that weird tonal shifts work in films the same way they can in a TV with solid character development (they don’t). I want to root for the guy; he’s local (grew up the next town over from me, and I’m only a couple degrees removed from him in several different ways), and I still love Scrubs. But goodwill only goes so far if he doesn’t have the chops to keep us actually entertained.
Yeah I enjoyed Garden State despite a couple of Extremely Cringey lines, but that’s pretty much his peak. Wonder how much of that was just Natalie Portman carrying things.
Loved GS
Agreed. Compare Garden State to Elizabethtown and I think it’s clear that Garden State is doing something right.
Fair take.
A scene that is supposed to be moving becomes odd when a famous face pops up, so the viewer is trying to figure out what they’re doing there instead of following the story.The mere presence of this person derails your train of thought? Ask your doctor if Ritalin is right for you.
The A.V. Club shitting on Zack Braff. It’s like 2007 all over again (did Amelie write this?)
A ‘D’? A genuine, no-fooling ‘D’? Oh, we haven’t had one of those in a while. Gather the kids, they’ll want to see this!
…Zach Braff comes up well short…In every possible way.
zach braff catching a lot of flak here but florence pugh also sucks!
“To depict Allison’s addiction, Braff resorts not to one but two montages. Making the montages even more absurdly comical are the on-the-nose lyrics of the songs chosen”Whew, for a moment there, I forgot it was from the writer/director of Garden State
Changing your hair every role doesn’t make you a great talent. I don’t get the flavor of the month hysteria over Florence Pugh. She’s a million miles from Jennifer Lawrence or Kate Winslet.