A Good Person (2023)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Florence Pugh, Molly Shannon, Chinaza Uche, Morgan Freeman
written and directed by Zach Braff

by Walter Chaw The answer to a question no one asked (what would happen if you smushed misery porn into eldersploitation and had Zach Braff do it?), A Good Person is, on a scale of 28 Days to Less Than Zero, somewhere in the Bright Lights, Big City neighbourhood of Girl, Interrupted. That’s not fair–it’s not as good as any of those movies. I don’t know if this trainwreck caused Miss Flo to come to her senses and leave her two-decades-older beau, but I like to think so, because then at least something good came out of this self-pitying 15-year-old’s adaptation of The Bell Jar. The hope that catastrophic events can lead to positive outcomes is the engine driving A Good Person, too, as Braff’s patented manic pixie dream construct, Allison, a girl who sings and plays the piano at her own engagement party, gets high and complains about not being able to feel her ankles, and tells her dull-as-dishwater fiance, Nathan (Chinanza Uche), about how a creepy doctor at work is maybe hitting on her. So effervescent! So full of life! Look at how she puts her foot in his face to underscore her ankle’s numbness! Look how she does a silly interpretive dance that Braff only shoots from the chest up, for some reason, before Allison wants to make out under a top sheet. Anyway, Allison is in the middle of a riff when she drives her future sister-in-law into a backhoe, killing her and sending Allison into a shame spiral as she faces the consequences of her quirkiness for the first time in her life. Apparently, she’s killed her future brother-in-law as well, though no one seems to care. I mean, both of her victims appear for all of 20 seconds before they become tragic devices inaugurating an irritating white girl’s redemption arc. They make so little impact that for the film’s first hour, I thought the brother-in-law (Toby Onwumere) was Nathan and that Nathan was a ghost.

If you think you’re exhausted, imagine how I feel.

Time passes, and Allison stops bathing. She sleeps into the afternoon on mom Molly Shannon’s couch and cuts her own hair with the help of a YouTube tutorial. “I love it,” she drones at her freshly-shorn reflection–and why not? It’s Florence Pugh, roughin’ it unconvincingly. To dampen the pain of getting into an accident, see, she has broken up with Nathan and gotten hooked on Oxy. She doesn’t otherwise have outward signs of having suffered any injuries in the wreck, but I’m not a doctor. Later, she tells a visitor, “I nearly put makeup on and then I just laughed at myself.” I used to be a theatre kid, and I’m pretty sure I knew Allison. We all know an Allison. “I nearly put makeup on and then I just laughed at myself”–God, how poignant, yeah? How self-actualized and raw. She’s come a long way, Allison has, hasn’t she? Wait until you hear the new song she wrote and performs for her in-patient therapy group while Braff runs a montage of everyone carrying on with their lives during Allison’s time in rehab. It goes like this: “I hate myself, I hate myself, I fucking hate myself/And IIIIIIIII, I want days of pain to feel the things I neeeeeeed to pay off this shame!” It’s the kind of song someone writes to make fun of Morrissey, except Morrissey, in addition to being a total asshole, was for a while writing genuinely beautiful paeans to self-loathing and confusion for a generation of teens who needed to hear their pain read back to them as poetry. The only person being serenaded by this garbage is Braff. Braff, singing this to himself under his breath as he looks out on a Manhattan spring. Braff, who, with this film, has now completed an Ozymandian trilogy of mawkish solipsism, the sum total of which has amounted to only a brief moment of acceptability for The Shins.

I haven’t mentioned 16-year-old Ryan (Celeste O’Connor), a stock rebellious, sex-lovin’, misbehavin’ teen who, having lost her mom (Nathan’s sister), is now being raised by recovering alcoholic and ex-cop Daniel (Morgan Freeman). Daniel likes model trains since he can create a world of order and eternity; every time he starts talking about having been on the force, I try to imagine that A Good Person is a stealth sequel to Se7en and that this is his Somerset, cast for his sins in the role of shouty grampy to a sitcom gamine who gets roofied for her troubles by a straw stoner. Allison reconnects with Daniel and connects for the first time, somehow, with Ryan, raising the question of why it is they’ve never met, given how Ryan’s uncle was days away from marrying Allison. I kid. To raise a question, you need someone to care about the answer. Allison and Ryan form a bond, and Allison and Daniel form a bond, and there are pages and pages and somehow more pages of moony, on-the-nose monologues in which people perform extended soliloquies at each other. Unless you’re doing “In Treatment”, if you contrive multiple therapy sessions for your characters to download, you should probably just write it all out and burn it in the backyard with sage. Anyway, this is the part where I say Pugh and Freeman are good even if the film isn’t, but what I would rather say is that Allison and Nathan should go on a team-building retreat with that asshole Ally and her also-Black milquetoast ex-fiance Sean from Dave Franco and Alison Brie’s own pointedly similar, token-pumping vanity piece Somebody I Used to Know, and leave the rest of us alone.