Directed By Zach Braff

Starring – Florence Pugh, Morgan Freeman, Celeste O’ Connor

The Plot – Daniel (Freeman) is brought together with Allison (Pugh), the once thriving young woman with a bright future who was involved in an unimaginable tragedy that took his daughter’s life. As grief-stricken Daniel navigates raising his teenage granddaughter and Allison seeks redemption, they discover that friendship, forgiveness, and hope can flourish in unlikely places.

Rated R for drug abuse, adult language throughout and some sexual references.

A GOOD PERSON | Official Trailer – YouTube

POSITIVES

It takes a while for the person in the title to properly materialize, but the journey before her helps to supplant a duo of painfully persuasive performances from Pugh and Freeman that seamlessly combine humility and humanity to the perils of addiction, affording each of them ample time to shine with investments to character that emotionally allow each of them to disappear into their respective roles. For Pugh, she once again certifies herself as one of the best actresses going today, with enough dramatic intensity and facial representation of the internal struggle taking place from within that always gives the audience a pivotal insight into the many strange decisions her character makes. Pugh also gets to show-off some vocal range in singing a couple of tracks for the movie’s soundtrack, and if for whatever reason her film career descepates, she has a back-up plan in front of a microphone yearning for her sultry seductiveness for 60’s favorites. For Freeman, on the surface level it appears more of the gentle guiding force that has dominated the last twenty years of his career, but there’s a bitterness and edginess to Daniel that not only makes him compelling as one of two dual protagonists in the narrative, but also affords Morgan the accessibility to once again get his hands dirty with many thematic impulses that dominate his character make-up, proving that even at the age of 85-years-old, Morgan still has the capability to dominate the attention of an audience hanging on to the tenderness and vulnerability of the ensuing narrative. Speaking of those vital ingredients, Braff’s script and overall direction basks in each of them with unfiltered exploration that doesn’t always bring out the best in his characters, but does articulate the struggle that they face in the combined struggle of shared grief and clean living that bonds them together. Braff explores this heftly in his storytelling, but it’s his visual intuitions that are most conveying, illustrating scenes of influence with distorted visuals, spinning camera work, and even clever song choices that help to convey an immersive element to Allison’s plight, and how one inadvertant decision from a friend or family member could serve as the violent shove to push her back into relapsing. Braff’s dialogue could certainly use improvement, as I will get to in a second, but every once in a while he managaes to imbed these throwaway lines involving vital social commentary to interactions that are otherwise considered throwaway, giving a brash but honest approach to sobriety that should not only articulate how far we still have to go to make this easier accessible for the victims enveloped by it, but also proof for the pudding why many more unfortunately fail than succeed with finding a healthy relief.

NEGATIVES

Braff’s film has plenty going for it, but subtlety is never one of these things, with the dialogue and interactions smothered by unnecessary vulgarity and spiked melodrama that more times than not it doesn’t capably earn. This is most prominent during the first half of the film, where characters react in shouting matches and mean-spirited words that not only makes them difficult to properly invest in throughout the experience, but also garners more than a few hearty chuckles during scenes and sequences that I can only speculate were meant to be serious in the depths of addiction. It becomes so distracting and repetitive by the film’s midway point that it exhausted me for all of the wrong reasons, and in the case of the movie’s eventual climax during the third act, underwhelmed as a result of exploiting the well of anxious emotions so often, to the point that it goes dry long before that. In addition to the dialogue, the film is also plagued by a nagging tonal imbalance that it never eludes during the entirety of the proceeedings, further complicating the editing of the finished product by shifting the personality of its demeanor so often and candidly that makes it feel like two respective films about the same subject fighting for attention. This unfortunate disjointment undercut the natural progression of events so forcefully that it often compromises the ingenuity of its storytelling, in turn channeling an exploitative nature that a majority of films about addiction aren’t able to properly evade, very few moments of downtime in between to properly pace the more traumatic moments of Allison’s bumpy road. Speaking of pacing, the film is also overtly overlong at 125 minutes, with a breezy opening act that gives way to the sluggish sedation of an arc that rarely evolves beyond the familiarity of an outline that we can easily predict from a mile away. As is the case for most addiction narratives, the protagonist will repeatedly regress to illustrate the difficulties associated with properly shaking the disease, but when it comes at the cost of directly undercutting Allison’s redemptive arc, which the movie doesn’t fully earn, it leaves the structure feeling a bit too repetitive in the defining moments of the narrative, in turn making “A Good Person” feel every but the magnitude of its length, in ways that aren’t flattering or endearing to the extent of the storytelling.

OVERALL
“A Good Person” is anchored by the gravitational pull of Pugh and Freeman centering its experience with no shortage of heart or vulnerability to the proceedings but is ultimately sunk by a frustrating execution that almost completely wipes away the familiarity of humanity to what hangs in the balance. While the hopelessness and captivity of addiction are accurately articulated in Braff’s audaciously artistic approach to visual storytelling, the artificiality of overtly strained melodrama in an overstuffed screenplay ultimately condemns the nobility of its approach, plaguing the experience with more Hallmark schmaltz than any good person needs to live a promising life.

My Grade: 5/10 or D+