A Good Person doesn’t waste time. Its leading character Allison (Florence Pugh) is immediately presented as having a happy life that’s full of love and promise. Quickly, she’s involved in an accident that she survives but others don’t. Before long she’s hit rock bottom: she is unemployed and lives with her mother (Molly Shannon), she breaks up with her loving fiancé (Chinaza Uche), and she succumbs to opioid addiction. There’s an economy to the early goings that feels brisk but hints at storytelling problems, coming on like footnotes to the narrative instead of fully dramatized scenes.
Writer-director Zach Braff speeds through the setup to get to the meat of his film: the relationship between Allison and Daniel (Morgan Freeman). He’s a retired cop who’s been sober for years and has been affected by the same tragic accident that Allison survived. They run into each other by chance in an AA meeting and soon they are helping each other navigate their grief. Allison is trying to kick her opioid addiction while Daniel is raising his teenage granddaughter (Celeste O’Connor) on his own. Shenanigans ensue. Yes, you read that correctly. In presenting Allison and Daniel’s complicated lives, Braff resorts to implausible storylines and scenes full of histrionics. To break the high drama of this story of survival, he injects broad humor that unfortunately feels jarring and not organic. Comedy can come out of tragedy but not in this clashing manner.
A Good Person is all over the place; a mismatch of tones. One part of it is a serious drama about overcoming grief and forging a path forward in the aftermath of a tragedy. The other part is a comedy of manners about the hijinks that can arise when people of different generations try to live together. Neither part works. The drama is a cluster of scenes with bad dialogue and platitudes instead of actual pathos. The comedy comes in when it’s uncalled for, breaking whatever genuine emotion the actors worked hard to craft. Sometimes all of this happens within the same scene, causing whiplash.
To depict Allison’s addiction, Braff resorts not to one but two montages. Making the montages even more absurdly comical are the on-the-nose lyrics of the songs chosen. A Good Person tries to form many relationships using its coterie of characters. All of them end up being implausible, more a screenwriter’s concoction than anything based in reality. Furthermore, the casting of the film’s smaller roles is confusing. A scene that is supposed to be moving becomes odd when a famous face pops up, so the viewer is trying to figure out what they’re doing there instead of following the story. Other times a comedic actor adds to the atonality of the film by puncturing an otherwise dramatic scene with an inane joke.
Consequently, a few good actors are left stranded trying to make sense of this mess. Both Pugh and Freeman invest their characters with grounded emotions that do not register because the film keeps shifting tones and working against their performances. Pugh brings humor to her line readings; she does not need the jokes that the script has in spades. Freeman looks uncomfortable in the sitcom-like storyline about his character’s relationship with his granddaughter. He’s not a comedic actor and that’s exacerbated by giving him most of the broadest comedic scenes. Fortunately, when it’s just the two of them, they manage to finagle a few genuinely moving moments.
Not only does Braff have no command of the film’s tone as a writer, he does not manage to have a firm grasp on its rhythm as a filmmaker. He undercuts his actors’ performances. For example, in Pugh’s big confession scene, he keeps cutting away from her to record the reactions of the other actors around her. That lessens the payoff, showing a bunch of bemused faces instead of the actor who’s wringing real emotions. It’s another befuddling choice in a movie full of them.
Asking the question “what makes a good person” might have been an intriguing idea. However, in trying to come up with an answer, A Good Person ends up presenting an overwrought narrative that’s full of cliches that do not resonate.