Zach Braff’s been at it for a while now. The 47-year-old actor, famous for his lead role on NBC’s Scrubs, made his directorial debut with 2004’s irrepressibly quirky Garden State, a film that has attracted praise and ire in equal measure for its impact on the indie filmmaking landscape and subsequent “mainstreamed” musical career of the Shins. Following 2014’s Wish I Was Here, a crowdfunded “spiritual sequel” to Garden State that failed to garner positive critical or box office attention, Braff disappeared from the public eye. He flirted with studio comedy as the director of octogenarian heist film Going in Style in 2017, and now returns to his home state of New Jersey, as well as his indie roots, for a project with far more serious intent.
A Good Person is a film about the opioid epidemic. It’s also 129 minutes long. Clearly, Braff wanted to say something here, but the result is a confusing hodgepodge of ideas and tones that betrays his dramatic limitations as a writer-director. Florence Pugh stars as Allison, a young woman who, in the lead-up to her wedding, causes a car accident that tragically results in the deaths of her soon-to-be brother and sister-in-law. A year later, having broken up with her fiancée Nathan (Chinaza Uche), Allison attempts to mend her mental anguish through a debilitating addiction to prescription painkillers. It’s not until she enters a church therapy group, co-run by Daniel (Morgan Freeman), the estranged father of her ex-fiancée and the woman whose death she in-part caused, that Allison begins to take steps towards kicking her addiction and picking up the pieces of her shattered life.
With game performances by the always-dependable Pugh, Braff’s partner at the time he wrote the script (they’ve since broken up), and a refreshingly down-to-earth Morgan Freeman, A Good Person has distinct dramatic pedigree. It’s especially nice to see Freeman back in action after a period of low-rent DTV projects. The 85-year-old actor displays genuine grit and pathos as Daniel, a recovering alcoholic and ex-cop struggling to reconnect with his son after years of abuse, all while raising his now-orphaned granddaughter, Ryan (Celeste O’Connor). Pugh, apparently contractually obligated to take on roles in which her characters spend at least 50% of the movie in tears, is inarguably effective as Allison. She carries much of Braff’s melodramatic screenplay on her shoulders, maintaining authenticity even when the dialogue fails her. There are enjoyable supporting turns from Molly Shannon as Allison’s well-intentioned but spacey mother, and Uche, who lends realistic depth to his portrayal of the emotionally conflicted Nathan. O’Connor, as Ryan, is unfortunately the weak link, struggling to convey the intense emotional trauma that would cause her to make certain decisions crucial to the overall story.
Whilst momentarily investing from scene-to-scene, pacing, tone and structure are all over the place. Firstly, the film is brutally overlong. From excess dialogue to aimless scenes, and at least two different endings, it’s more than apparent what could’ve been cut. Braff’s screenplay is also weirdly glib. Characteristic opening voice-over by Freeman, offered over an arial view of a model train set, conveys the tone: “For the model train enthusiast, we lord over a world where the neighbors are always kind, the lovers always end up together and the trains take you to far-off places you always swore you’d go. In life, of course, nothing is nearly so neat and tidy.” This type of heavy-handed, “theme-stated” dialogue belongs in a Hallmark movie, and having it spoken by one of the most famous voices in the world only cements its artifice. Braff wants Freeman both ways, simultaneously a rugged, flawed man and a bastion of almost omniscient wisdom and thematic significance. It’s symbolic of a film whose tone contradicts itself at every turn – raw but cutesy, heavy but light.
Again, A Good Person is about the opioid epidemic, but what it’s really about is the imperfect but earnest ways in which messy people attempt to mend the trajectories of their broken lives. Allison’s story is one of a flawed, but fundamentally “good” person (hence the title) whose obvious path to redemption is blocked only by her inability to recognize her own innate value. Similarly, Daniel uses aggression to alleviate his own guilt and grief over events both in and out of his control. By continuously bouncing between the two before they’ve even met, Braff saps a lot of the dramatic tension that would come from their eventual reunion. Pre-crash Allison is established as a pharmaceutical representative, otherwise known as a “drug rep.” She pushes onto doctors and clinics the same pills she ends up getting addicted to. It’s a potentially interesting piece of commentary that’s inexplicably never addressed beyond the opening scenes. The irony of her employment and subsequent addiction would make for far more compelling and thorny drama than the cloying adopted daughter redemption arc A Good Person eventually relapses into.
Asking a filmmaker “why” they made a film is always going to be a dubious query. Perhaps this story was personal to Braff. He’s on record stating that he wrote the screenplay specifically for Pugh and New Jersey has struggled with the opioid crisis since the late ‘90s. But the question remains, nevertheless. However genuine the intent, it’s an end product is built on falsehood, a lengthy collection of dramatic strands that coalesce only in the most contrived ways. Life doesn’t work like this. Even if meant as an ironic mirror to the “reality” that Braff deems to explore, the model train set is a rather unfortunate symbol for the film overall: a manufactured vehicle, running on loops with nowhere to go.
Photo courtesy of United Artists Releasing
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