A Good Person (2023)
Daniel (Morgan Freeman) and Allison (Florence Pugh) slowly face down their demons
Anyone can fall off the wagon. Even those determined to halt a harmful practice can, for “no good reason”, be pulled under by it again.
Hooked on drugs or booze, they try to stop but can slip back into doing what they know is harming them.
I’ve been there and done that. At my lowest, when I did myself great injury, I could be walloped by a stark question: Am I a “bad person”?
Writer-director Zach Braff’s A Good Person, unsurprisingly, wants to tell every substance abuser, No, that’s not true.
His script insists that drifting back into a corrosive habit, even gleefully picking it up again, isn’t a character trait. It arises from pain. It’s not who you are.
No argument from me on that point.
But I wish his script had given us a clearer sense of what his troubled characters actually want.
The movie vividly portrays the addictions and rotten behavior they’re battling against, but I kept wondering what they supposed themselves to be fighting for.
My confusion began right away, meeting the protagonist, Allison (Florence Pugh), at her engagement party.
Before dozens of beaming guests, she plays piano and sings a sultry, beckoning love song to her shy fiancé Nathan (Chinaza Uche).
The guests, and proudly smiling Nathan, seem to applaud not just Allison’s singing for the occasion, but her career hopes.
Whatever her dreams for herself and Nathan, they’re shattered when, at the wheel driving Nathan’s sister and brother-in-law from New Jersey to Manhattan, Allison, reaching for her phone, takes her eye off the road.
The car crashes, killing both passengers.
Allison survives. A year later, Nathan has ended their relationship and Allison still hasn’t overcome the trauma, sneakily drinking and popping pills.
She continues living at home with her exasperated mother Diane (Molly Shannon), who furiously flushes Allison’s secreted drugs down the toilet and screams at her daughter to pull herself together and get a job.
But Allison can’t heal. And the accident scattered even more pain.
Nathan’s deceased sister and brother-in-law left a 16-year-old daughter, Ryan (Celeste O'Connor), who’s still enraged in her belief that Allison caused her parents’ death.
Angry too, but also “wise” enough to be sorrowful, is Nathan’s father and Ryan’s grandfather, Daniel (Morgan Freeman).
He’s a widowed retired cop who’s been saddled with raising Ryan and knows he’s not doing a great job.
The girl is getting in fights at school, underperforming in her classes and having unprotected sex.
Daniel has overcome a drinking problem, but in his frustration raising Ryan he nearly picks up the bottle again. Panicked, he joins an Alcoholics Anonymous group.
One day, who should show up there but Allison?
They form a shaky bond, but we’re hard pressed to imagine a way forward for either of them.
Braff’s script puts the faltering older man and the still lapsing, maybe permanently stuck, young woman through the wringer. In agonizing detail.
Allison tricks Diane into giving her back the Oxycontin capsules the wary mother had hidden away.
When those capsules run out, Allison tries to blackmail an old friend working in a medical facility into slipping her a fresh prescription. The friend says hell no.
Desperate, Allison grovels before two old high school friends who are now confirmed junkies, begging them to let her smoke god-knows-what from their crack pipe.
As Daniel and Allison cling to the AA group, he courts disaster again, too.
Old ghosts still haunt him. He was regularly beaten by his father until the day the old man died.
Never recovering from that childhood abuse, Daniel, once he was married and a father to Nathan, started drinking (mimicking his father?).
While intoxicated he’d sometimes (again mimicking his father?) beat Nathan, permanently injuring the boy’s hearing in one ear. Nathan of course hasn’t recovered from that cruel mistreatment.
These two performances alone are enough reason to hang on – and you will struggle – through A Good Person.
Braff is in touch with a worthy subject. To get past pain you can’t ignore or conceal it, you have to consciously go through it, bear witness to it hurting you.
That’s how you become damned sure you never want to go back there again.
And Daniel can’t forget it. The bottle beckons to him yet again.
Ryan, meanwhile, is chasing boys and still not buckling down in school, and Allison, trying to help her, mistakenly leads her into a drug den, where Daniel arrives to find them both wandering, high on substances they can’t name.
On it goes, with Braff never telling us what could set these people on a healthier course, what they could devote themselves to in order to live clean.
Their unrelenting suffering is graphic, while their hopes remain hazy, too weak or incalculable to offer a plausible way out.
Too often, of course, that’s simply life, and there isn’t much more to be said.
But it doesn’t necessarily make for compelling drama, which is what we go to movies for.
Braff is committed to the notion of redeeming lost souls mired in drug use. Fine. But as we watch we need to get at least an idea of what would make hurting people want to stop abusing themselves.
The only useful way to grapple with that problem is to show life after substance abuse, when one’s besetting demons have actually come to light and can gradually be fought off and faced down.
I’ve been there and done that, too. And Braff could more profitably have devoted the second half of his movie to that slow, arduous climb back to balance.
I don’t use the word “sobriety”. It suggests an end to wanting to go under.
Since life remains hard, I’ve found that the galling truth is that you never entirely stop yearning to go under.
The only counterforce is to keep moving upward, albeit with setbacks, and sometimes only by millimeters.
Accomplishing that, you don’t even have to look down any longer to know what awaits you there.
That view doesn’t put you on a mountaintop, but it is a revivifying vantage point. I wish Braff could have granted his people that sometimes vanishingly visible but lasting conquest.
Allison and Daniel are allies as well as antagonists in their fraught search for redemption
Still, some remarkable work is on view in his movie and it’s a pleasure to take in much of it.
Pugh gives a studied, nuanced, unpretty performance. She doesn’t spare Allison, showing this dangerously drifting woman’s deceit, pettiness and cowardice in full, bitter flower.
Freeman does some of his best work. What’s remarkable on one hand is watching the actor come to terms with Daniel’s regrets, pain and doubts about not just his granddaughter’s but his own future.
On the other hand, it’s just as thrilling to see Freeman play to the other characters while unabashedly acting for the camera, piping his emotions directly to us in the audience.
Only the greatest movie actors can pull off both those feats at the same time.
I sensed I just might be glimpsing some of Freeman’s own dismay at life’s twists rippling across that craggy, lived-in face.
It felt as if I were being granted a privileged look inside the triumphant man as well as the seasoned actor.
These two performances alone are enough reason to hang on – and you will struggle – through A Good Person.
Braff is in touch with a worthy subject. To get past pain you can’t ignore or conceal it, you have to consciously go through it, bear witness to it hurting you.
That’s how you become damned sure you never want to go back there again.
Braff shows us half the journey. Kudos to him. How many movies honestly try to do even that much?