A Good Person Review: Florence Pugh's Performance Can't Save This Overly Didactic Story
We all contain multitudes. We can be good people who do bad things. And when we are pummeled by something sudden and horrific, the struggle to continue on after that trauma and grief can break us down if we don't have support, and sometimes even if we do. That's the premise of Zach Braff's "A Good Person," a film where the writer-director tackles a slew of difficult and complex issues, from grief to drug and alcohol addiction, to teenage sex and the difficulty of forgiving yourself or others.
The story centers on Allison (Florence Pugh), a woman whose life shatters after she survives a car crash that causes the deaths of her future sister-and-law and her sister-in-law's husband. After spending the first part of the movie establishing how happy and healthy everyone is before the accident, "A Good Person" jumps forward to one year later, when Allison and her fiancé Nathan (Chinaza Uche) have broken up, and Allison — unemployed, stuck in grief, and addicted to opioids — lives back at home with her mother (Molly Shannon). We watch Allison continue to be pulled down by her addiction until she finally makes it to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting ... only to encounter Daniel (Morgan Freeman), the father of her former fiancé and the woman killed in the car she was driving.
Daniel is far from perfect — he is estranged from Allison's former fiancé for good reason — but Freeman's character takes Allison's appearance at his AA meeting as a sign for him to help her. They form a tenuous relationship, made all the more complicated by the fact that Daniel is raising his granddaughter after the high schooler's parents both died in the crash.
Complex issues explored with a heavy, awkward hand
Those expecting a fairy tale ending for these characters won't get one, and that speaks in the movie's favor. One of the central conceits of the film is that no one is "good" or "bad," and most of the characters we are supposed to care about are flawed, with some having committed objectively horrible acts. There is no going back to the way things were, but there is the hope of everyone building new lives around the grief and tragedy they've all faced and, in some instances, caused.
The messages of the film, however, often veer into didactic territory, with several scenes being overly explicit and spelling out what is going on with the characters. We chronicle Allison's spiral into addiction, for example, in almost paint-by-numbers fashion, with her former pharmaceutical sales rep colleague and her old high school classmates literally telling us (or forcing her to tell us) how low she has fallen.
That's not to say that Pugh's performance of Allison's struggles isn't compelling. Pugh is, in fact, undeniably the best part of the film. The way she captures Allison's despair, depression, self-loathing, and daily struggle just to decide to stay alive will stick with you. It will also strike true for many of those who may have felt similarly in their lives at some point. Pugh and her metaphorically laden shorn hair alone, however, can't rescue the film from its stilted dialogue, muddled character arcs, and relationships that don't quite come together into something believable.
Pugh's exemplary performance isn't enough
It's not easy to make a movie that addresses such weighty topics, and "A Good Person," with its grey-tinged view of this stifling New Jersey town overlaid with an emotive soundtrack, makes a strong attempt to do so. The specific actions and reactions of the characters beyond Pugh and Uche's, however, struggle to feel relatable. Freeman's Daniel, for example, is given his own demons and his own grief, but his actions and responses to events in the film come across as a parable rather than the struggles of a fully realized person. The issues the movie addresses are weighty and worth addressing — but here, they overwhelm the characters at the expense of a compelling story.
That's not to say there aren't moving moments in "A Good Person" — there's a good chance you'll tear up at more than one point, most likely when Pugh's performance takes center stage. But these scenes are fleeting and disparate enough that they get bogged down by the rest of the film. The intentions of the movie are clear and admirable, but the execution of "A Good Person," in the end, misses the mark.
/Film Rating: 5 out of 10
"A Good Person" premieres in theaters on March 24, 2023.