'A Good Person' Review: Overlong And Cliché
Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman star in the melodramatic character study.
Credit: Jeong Park / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures © 2023 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Six years after his most recent feature and 19 years after his directorial debut, director Zach Braff has returned with his latest film, A Good Person. A Good Person opens with 25-year-old Alison (Florence Pugh), newly engaged to Nathan (Chinaza Uche), performing on the piano at their engagement party. For these two, it seems like nothing could go wrong, but that doesn’t make for an interesting movie. The next morning, when Alison is going to go wedding dress shopping with her future sister-in-law and her husband, she gets into a car accident on the freeway, killing the two passengers and leaving her to deal with the consequences. When we pick up with Alison a year later, her life has spiraled out of control, up to the point where she finds herself in an alcoholics anonymous meeting, seated across from Daniel (Morgan Freeman), the father of the man she was going to marry, and the woman who died in her car.
Credit: Jeong Park / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures © 2023 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. All Rights Reserved.
To make a film like this a success, you need strong, likable lead performers, and that’s what we’ve received from the film in Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman. Pugh, who will be dominating theaters all year long, is tasked with playing a character who, at times, isn’t the most likable person and is hard to rally behind (made evident by the person sitting behind me who tsk-tsk-tsk’d throughout the entire film whenever Alison (Pugh) did something that they didn’t agree with), a sentiment that, by the end, I agreed with. A Good Person pulls predictable beats from the playbook of this genre, something that we’ve seen recently from films like The Long Game and A Man Called Otto, and doesn’t evolve upon them to fit the narrative. It feels like Braff searched for a template for the genre he wanted this film to be in and filled in the boxes to compose the film’s story. This, among other things, is what leads to the film’s muddled end-of-second-act/early-third-act, as it tries to set up the ending it desires. The finished product is stretched out with conflicting ideas that don’t make the most sense, along with melodramatic undertones, making our protagonist come off as immature.
To retouch upon the leading performances of Pugh and Freeman, they work well together. For the first time in a long time, it feels like Morgan Freeman truly cares about the role he’s playing, and is willing to commit enough to uncover the layers of the character, and has great chemistry with Pugh while doing so. Pugh is tasked with a more complex role than Freeman is, having to deal with the ups and downs of her character’s life, while Daniel (Freeman) has clear motivations and is easy to get behind. These two are the reason that A Good Person works.
Credit: Jeong Park / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures © 2023 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Look, is A Good Person the best movie of the year? No. Is it bad? No. The film fails to truly impact its genre, which continues to receive outings of this nature consistently every few months. That said, the film is a demonstration of another great performance from Florence Pugh, helped by an emotionally-driven Morgan Freeman. The two can’t escape the film’s messy writing and melodramatic undertones, even if the overall heart is in the right place.
A Good Person is now in theaters.
