It’s never a positive sign if your addiction movie makes Ron Howard’s “Hillbilly Elegy” look subtle by comparison, but that’s where Zach Braff’s heavy-handed new feature, “A Good Person,” wallows.
The film (opening Thursday in South Florida) starts promisingly enough, especially for the charming lovebirds at its center, Allison and Nathan (Florence Pugh and Chinaza Uche), fiancées celebrating their engagement. He’s an athlete, and she’s an aspiring singer-songwriter toiling, for the time being at least, as a salesperson for Big Pharma. “I’m not going to go to hell for moderate to severe psoriasis,” she tells herself.
En route to try on wedding dresses, tragedy strikes: A car accident, caused by Allie’s distracted driving, that takes two innocent lives from Nathan’s side of the family. Cut to a year later, and Nathan is out of the picture. In an irony that’s thankfully not terribly belabored, given her previous profession, Allie is now addicted to the Oxycontin initially prescribed for physical pain. She lives with her mom (Molly Shannon in a thankless role), whose substances of preference are wine and cigarettes, in an addict’s typical suburban hellscape. Just moments into experiencing this new, bedraggled version of Allie, we see pills flushed down a toilet, a screaming match between mother and grown child, desperate groveling to a pharmacist to refill a lapsed prescription, and street drugs scored from a skeevy barfly straight out of Central Casting.
Braff has written and directed fine work in the past—“Garden State” was a touchstone of my college years—but unlike that personal and enduring debut, “A Good Person” feels schematic and anonymous, a Xerox of every addiction picture that’s come before it. Addressing sensitive subjects with a leaden touch, “A Good Person” is littered with redemption-movie clichés.
They extend to its twin story, one that eventually re-collides with Allie’s. Morgan Freeman, dusting off his deific persona and spiking it with the saltiness of his Vietnam veteran backstory, plays Nathan’s estranged father Daniel, an abusive alcoholic 10 years sober, whose battle with the bottle is re-ignited by Allie’s auto accident and its shattering aftermath. The two characters meet on their road to Damascus when Allie appears in Daniel’s recovery group, forging an unlikely alliance.
“A Good Person” is a reminder that Freeman, for all the familiar beats and rhythms with which he infuses Daniel, is indeed a marvelous actor, and he nearly redeems every scene he’s in. With all respect to Pugh, one of the finest actors of her generation and who goes through all the motions of an addict’s sickness without issue, only Freeman is able to sell Braff’s risible dialogue and at least create the illusion of a three-dimensional person.
The script, though, is unsalvageable. Every scene feels like a lecture, nearly every moment heavier than the piano at which Allie gradually regains her joie de vivre. Its contrivances are both fundamental and crassly minor; an active shooter drill at the school of Daniel’s granddaughter is exploited as a story device just to plant the girl back home at a time when she isn’t supposed to be. It’s pretty disgusting, the more I think about it.
It’s no surprise, then, that Braff resorts to an emotionally manipulative score to sell this material, because it doesn’t pass the smell test of authenticity on its own. To see how well the opioid epidemic can be handled from every angle, witness the magisterial sweep of Hulu’s “Dopesick,” which had truth to spare. There’s little to be found in Braff’s secondhand drama, a misguided folly of noble intent.
“A Good Person” opens Thursday at Cinemark Palace in Boca Raton, Paragon Theaters in Delray Beach and other South Florida theaters.
For more of Boca magazine’s arts and entertainment coverage, click here.
