‘A Good Person’: Review

Dir/scr: Zach Braff. US. 2022. 129mins

Florence Pugh does significant emotional heavy lifting in A Good Person, a manipulative drama about a young woman reeling from a tragedy that she accidentally caused and now cannot move on from. The Oscar-nominated actress gives a performance of such vulnerability and pain that it is frustrating just how much she is undercut by writer/director Zach Braff’s choice to tell this redemption story with convoluted plot twists and unearned tear-jerking moments. Both Pugh and Morgan Freeman bring poignancy to a film that cheats its emotions, rather than honestly explores themes of grief, addiction and forgiveness.

 Reviews will probably not be kind.

Opening on March 24 in the UK and US, A Good Person will generate attention thanks to its two leads. (There may also be some tabloid interest in the picture because Braff and Pugh, who are both producers, used to be a couple.) But although the film’s tendency toward feel-good sentimentality could appeal to audiences wanting a good cry, reviews will probably not be kind.

Allison (Pugh) seems to have everything going for her. Engaged to the handsome, sensitive Nathan (Chinaza Uche), she’s a talented singer and pianist with a bright future. But then one day, while driving her sister-in-law-to-be Molly (Nichelle Hines) and her husband, she is involved in terrible car crash, suffering severe injuries and killing both of her passengers. A year later, Allison has hit rock bottom, penniless and addicted to the OxyContin she started taking while recovering from the accident. (In addition, she and Nathan have broken up.) Deciding to attend an AA meeting, she runs into Nathan and Molly’s father Daniel (Freeman), a recovering alcoholic still mourning his daughter’s death. Allison feels awkward and ashamed but Daniel encourages her to stay, opening a door for a possible reconciliation between them.

Pugh is capable as a woman who lived a charmed life, only to have one terrible mistake destroy everything. In the film’s early stretches, there’s an implication that Allison considered herself superior to the people in her dead-end New Jersey town — but now that she’s desperate for pills to keep her numbed from the reality of what she has done, she no longer feels so smug. Pugh makes her character’s prickliness, self-loathing and downward spiral resonate: Allison is shattered, and she may never be able to put herself back together.

Her second chance comes in the convenient form of Daniel, who is equally devastated by the accident — plus, he now has to raise Ryan (Celeste O’Connor), his daughter’s recently adopted teenage daughter who never got a chance to know Molly. Ryan is a good student and a promising athlete, but she’s acting out because of the tragedy, exasperating the ageing Daniel. Allison and Daniel begin to bond over their shared addiction issues but eventually she will also try to connect with Ryan, who initially resents Allison but slowly comes to see her as a sympathetic figure attempting to make amends.

Freeman exudes quiet authority as this former cop who rightly blames Allison for what happened. (One of A Good Person’s main throughlines involves Allison finally accepting responsibility for the accident.) But Daniel starts to soften once he realises how much she is hurting too, finding in her an unexpected partner to work through his grief. The picture’s best scenes are between Pugh and Freeman as their characters navigate a potentially fraught friendship gingerly; they are forever linked – and trapped – by this accident.

In Braff’s previous films, Garden State and Wish I Was Here, he put his heart on his sleeve unashamedly, embracing the messiness of distraught individuals lost in their private anguish. The demonstrative sincerity of his work can be quite touching, but he often pushes too hard to elicit audience reaction. That weakness is especially prominent in A Good Person, which strains to produce emotional fireworks once Allison gets closer to Daniel and Ryan – resulting in predictable consequences. Especially egregious is how the screenplay invents unbelievable scenarios during the film’s final stretches, which artificially heighten the stakes but don’t jibe with the people we’ve come to know. 

Pugh and Freeman are superb at embodying their characters’ emotional wounds, but Braff’s melodramatic approach quickly becomes oppressive, clumsily orchestrating wild highs and lows with such inelegance that his protagonists start to resemble helpless pawns he is pushing around the narrative chessboard. Journeying through grief is often a painful process — one that requires patience and delicacy. For all of A Good Person’s attempts to honour that journey, Braff displays little of those qualities. He wants you to feel what he wants you to feel, no matter what.