A Good Person: A Not-So-Good Film
Zach Braff needed more pushback, Florence Pugh might need to be pickier with her roles
A Good Person is a bad movie, misfiring on almost every cylinder, with two superlative actors doing their very beast with subpar material. It’s the story of Allison (Florence Pugh), a former pharmaceutical rep that ends up building a relationship with Daniel (Morgan Freeman), her ex-fiancée’s estranged father as she recovers from a fatal car accident. It is Zach Braff’s fourth directed feature, his second collaboration with Morgan Freeman (with 2017’s Going in Style, which I haven’t seen but confused with 2013’s Last Vegas, which I have), and a demonstration that perhaps he should stick to TV or, optimistically, his best work is still in front of him.
To the good, the movie has a good story idea – the overall premise – former pharmaceutical rep deals with recovery after she’s thrust into opioid addiction by injuries and depression following a car accident where her fiancé’s sister and brother-in-law are killed while she’s driving. It’s a lot; immediately heavy and filled with implications. The movie does critique the pharmaceutical establishment broadly. And the plot beats written in a text outline make for compelling drama. Problematically, the moment-to-moment execution suffers – dialog is not great, performances do not mesh, and need of expediency for escalation creates wholly avoidable plot holes. Braff writes himself into several corners with no editors to lead him out.
A Good Person suffers, too, for an over-reliance on montage and fades to paper-over the spaces where character and relationship development should be. Its moral and ethical messages are confused not for want of good intentions but inability to execute. And the movie generally wants to dance with a certain realistic darkness but pulls away from genuine exploration through its use of music that’s just slightly too upbeat. It’s got bad instincts all over, yet Braff has been successful – even award-nominated – for his directorial work and, as a fan of Scrubs, I’d like to see him succeed artistically.
It's just a crying shame that I spent chunks of the early part of this film thinking I could be home watching something better. And my lasting impression once it ended was that someone ought to give Florence Pugh’s agent a talking to. Don’t Worry, Darling was bad, but much more competently directed. One more film worse than this is a trend if not a trajectory and – while I’m sure her career could recover through the sheer force of her talent – it would nonetheless be a waste of her time.
Pugh is good in the movie – mostly effective at conveying sadness despite the writer-director’s limitations – as well as being appropriately funny and both (1) cutting her own hair and (2) writing and performing her own songs. Molly Shannon plays her mother and several of her sequences make me feel as though Braff lacks either the ability or inclination to reel her in. Given the excess of ideas and impulses in the script, it's entirely possible he told her to improvise and just chose what he liked best, but it detracted from the film’s overall drama and at points felt like Shannon was in another film.
Just as I wondered how Pugh got into this film (they dated from 2019 to 2022, which may have been correlated if not causal), I wondered how Freeman ended up here. The man takes a lot of checks but he’s on the Hollywood Walk of Fame – maybe not everything he’s in is a cherished classic, but he’s starred in more films considered great across different genres and tastes than most actors dream of. The man played Mandela. So, I thought, perhaps each of them was told simultaneously that the other had already been signed in some sort of trick. But no, they’d both worked with Braff before. He’s probably just a fun hang and great to work with and super positive. And there’s very little Freeman could do on screen that would ruin his legacy at this point. What is not great is the final product.
It's almost hard for me to believe what I watched was a finished cut. Everyone involved deserves better, including Braff. It’s hard for me to believe he’s got the sort of clout to run his own production into the ground with no one trying to stop him, but he wrote, directed, and produced, so maybe there were insufficient guard rails.
Perhaps this should have been a television show.