A Good Person: Florence Pugh turns desperately to tequila – you may well too...
It’s always been hard to tell exactly what unique qualities Zach Braff’s films bring to the table, but in his fourth he achieves something accomplished by no other filmmaker to date: he extracts a bad performance from Florence Pugh. The Garden State director and the Don’t Worry Darling star were until recently an item, and their three-year relationship has yielded this inert and clumsy melodrama about a young woman’s struggle on multiple fronts – ethical, emotional and chemical – to come to terms with tragic loss.
Pugh plays Allison, whose rosy life collapses following a car accident in which she is hospitalised and her future sister in-law Molly (Nichelle Hines) is killed. The fault is arguably partly her own: she’s at the wheel, and briefly looks down to check the map at the very moment an enormous digger reverses without warning on to the motorway and directly into her vehicle’s path. But the film’s sort-of-but-not-really position on her guilt is typical of its frictionless millennial non-style: functional staging, tinkly pianos.
If Allison proves tricky to warm to, it’s less because of the moral ins and outs of her plight and more to do with Pugh’s clenched and plaintive performance – qualities which in these circumstances feel drainingly counterproductive. Now unemployed and no longer engaged, and given to ordering tequila before 11am and guzzling painkillers at every opportunity, Allison is the sort of character you want to find yourself loving in spite of your own better judgement. Instead, it’s hard to feel much of anything towards her: the haranguing friends for prescription drugs and berating old classmates in dive bars (a semi-joke about the difference between decor and decorum is dragged out a bit too long) all feel like screenwriting manoeuvres rather than the behaviour of someone grappling with grief.
And speaking of manoeuvres: whose honeyed baritone is that, monologuing about the pleasures of train sets in an attempt to glue-gun a metaphor about the illusion of orderly lives to the plot? Only Morgan Freeman’s! The 85-year-old, who also appeared in Braff’s 2017 heist comedy Going in Style, plays Daniel, the father of Allison’s ex-fiancé, the grandfather of Molly’s orphaned teenage daughter Ryan (a sparky Celeste O’Connor), and an alcoholic ex-cop also wrestling with the consequences of his own prior actions.
There’s a press-button-for-gravitas quality to Freeman’s casting, but the film never quite works out how best to exploit it, or how to make his reconciliation with Pugh’s Allison click. Some fun tangentially ensues when he chases a sexed-up 20-year-old out of his granddaughter’s bedroom, but a climactic crisis which centres on Freeman’s character, a gun and the Find my iPhone app feels pulled from a spare ideas drawer, and ties up this well-meant misadventure on an unfortunately ludicrous note.
15 cert, 129 min. In cinemas and on Sky Cinema from Friday March 24
