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A Good Person
The performances by Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman in the leading roles are strong, but the 2023 drama A Good Person eventually suffers from a meandering screenplay that makes an already long movie seem even longer.
Pugh plays Allison, a young woman engaged to be married and on top of the world until she is behind the wheel in a tragic car accident that kills her future sister-in-law and her husband. A year later, Allison has lost her fiancee and has become addicted to pills but sees a possible way out with the father of her former fiancee, a recovering alcoholic.
Zach Braff (Scrubs) wrote and directed this somber story that starts out very effectively because we're not sure what it's going to be about until the first 20 minutes of the movie are spent showing us how happy Allison is with her fiancee, so we suspect that they are going to be torn apart somehow, but Braff's method of doing it isn't what we expect. As a matter of fact, we're about halfway through the film before we learn exactly what happened between Allison and her fiancee, Nathan. This part of the film is quite riveting and has the viewer completely invested in Allison's pain.
Unfortunately, the film does start to become muddled when Allison starts attending AA meetings but is apparently just going through the motions. The relationship between Allison and Freeman's character comes off as forced and gets even more complicated when Allison comes face to face with Ryan, the daughter of the woman who was killed in the accident. Their first meeting is quite powerful, but a few minutes later, the two are BFF's bonding at a club and trying to help Freeman accept her new boyfriend. The scene of Allison and Daniel (Freeman) bonding over model trains goes on way too long and did we really need a scene of Allison accidentally running into Nathan and his new girlfriend. There's so much going on in the second half of the film, we end up wishing the story had stayed focused on Allison's grieving and recovery process. This movie ran slightly over two hours and I swear I thought it would never end.
Despite the muddled second half of the film, Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman are completely enchanting in their roles and make the viewer want to stick around and see what happens. Molly Shannon is quite good as Allison's mother as are Chinaza Uchu as Nathan, Zoe Lister-Jones as Allison's AA sponsor and Alex Wolff as Mark, a guy who went to high school with Allison who is reunited with her in a bar in a powerful scene early on. Braff has a good basic idea here, but he lets it get away from him.
The performances by Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman in the leading roles are strong, but the 2023 drama A Good Person eventually suffers from a meandering screenplay that makes an already long movie seem even longer.
Pugh plays Allison, a young woman engaged to be married and on top of the world until she is behind the wheel in a tragic car accident that kills her future sister-in-law and her husband. A year later, Allison has lost her fiancee and has become addicted to pills but sees a possible way out with the father of her former fiancee, a recovering alcoholic.
Zach Braff (Scrubs) wrote and directed this somber story that starts out very effectively because we're not sure what it's going to be about until the first 20 minutes of the movie are spent showing us how happy Allison is with her fiancee, so we suspect that they are going to be torn apart somehow, but Braff's method of doing it isn't what we expect. As a matter of fact, we're about halfway through the film before we learn exactly what happened between Allison and her fiancee, Nathan. This part of the film is quite riveting and has the viewer completely invested in Allison's pain.
Unfortunately, the film does start to become muddled when Allison starts attending AA meetings but is apparently just going through the motions. The relationship between Allison and Freeman's character comes off as forced and gets even more complicated when Allison comes face to face with Ryan, the daughter of the woman who was killed in the accident. Their first meeting is quite powerful, but a few minutes later, the two are BFF's bonding at a club and trying to help Freeman accept her new boyfriend. The scene of Allison and Daniel (Freeman) bonding over model trains goes on way too long and did we really need a scene of Allison accidentally running into Nathan and his new girlfriend. There's so much going on in the second half of the film, we end up wishing the story had stayed focused on Allison's grieving and recovery process. This movie ran slightly over two hours and I swear I thought it would never end.
Despite the muddled second half of the film, Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman are completely enchanting in their roles and make the viewer want to stick around and see what happens. Molly Shannon is quite good as Allison's mother as are Chinaza Uchu as Nathan, Zoe Lister-Jones as Allison's AA sponsor and Alex Wolff as Mark, a guy who went to high school with Allison who is reunited with her in a bar in a powerful scene early on. Braff has a good basic idea here, but he lets it get away from him.