A Good Person

Writer/director Braff takes Florence Pugh's 'good person who has done a bad thing' on an contrived journey towards self-forgiveness.

In his dual capacity as writer and director, Zach Braff here puts us through an ordeal of excruciating contrived nonsense: a masturbatory Calvary of ersatz empathy and emotional wellness. Braff puts us through a gruelling “relapse” montage as Allison hits the pills again after an illusory breakthrough and then a “recovery” montage as she gets it together. And the film’s single valuable lesson – the one about not looking at your phone while driving – is all but forgotten.

In his specific choice to make Allison an opioid addict, Braff brings America's opioid crisis into the film. For some viewers who've been personally affected by ...

She is blessed with youth, intelligence and artistic talents—a random and seemingly undeserving target at the center of all this suffering. By assembling it this way, the arc of the story doesn’t actually belong to Allison. A Good Person might have deepened if Allison and Daniel’s roles were reversed, had the central drama been about Daniel and Nathan’s rapport, with Allison recovering—or not—in the background. Even though Allison is responsible for his daughter’s death, Daniel pleads with her to stay at the AA meeting she arrives at by chance. The depressed mood in these movies saturates the screen with depictions of loss and grieving. A Good Person” is Zach Braff’s syrupy rendition of films like Ordinary People and The Sweet Hereafter.

Zach Braff's 'A Good Person,' starring Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman, explores addiction and maturity in a way that Braff hasn't before.

Another unusual scene late in the film finds Allison, Daniel, and Ryan at a party, and Braff is so focused on getting us to the party that he’s forgotten to explain why so many other characters from this cast just happen to find this location as well, popping up without any rationale. Yet it’s when Braff unites these two sides that A Good Person really soars, as we see Allison attempt to make penance for her actions, while Nathan does his best to move past the incident that changed his life. For example, we early on meet Allison and Nathan at their engagement party, and watching these two together and with their friends has an awkward tone to it that seems like Braff not knowing how to present these characters until after the tragedy strikes. Similarly, Daniel has been raising Ryan since her mother’s death, and with Ryan acting out in school and having sex with a boy far too old for her, it’s been a lot to deal with. The quote says “blissfully have I been lost in a world of my own creation,” and while we’ll come to learn that this is true of Daniel’s experience with this miniature world he’s made, this also could be true of the previous films Braff has written and directed. Allison takes Nathan’s sister and her partner into New York City to look at wedding dresses, and after looking at her phone's map for a second, she gets in a crash that kills the couple.

No matter how Florence Pugh continues to rise to the challenge, "A Good Person's" cascading of contrivances drown her out, writes reviewer Chase Hutchinson.

One of the few times Allison seems to be at peace is when she is swimming, something she did when she was younger. Though she moves to flee, he persuades her to stay and the two begin to form a tentative friendship. At the core of this, one scene with Pugh feels most indicative of the film’s problems. Following the troubled Allison (Pugh) as she tries to get sober and rebuild her life as the sole survivor of a fatal car accident from a year prior, it has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Dragged down by increasingly melodramatic escalations that soon become disastrous, it does a disservice to both the seriousness of the subject and its cast who do all they can to salvage it. Played by Celeste O’Connor of the recent horror film “Freaky,” she has big aspirations though is struggling through tough times at school made all the more difficult by the loss of her mother.