A Good Person

Recovering from drug addiction is a serious and painful process, not just for the person addicted but for everyone in their orbit. It is and has been a problem of epidemic proportions; most people have probably seen its effects either directly or secondhand. Combine the inherent drama of the addiction and recovery process with the universality of the problem and you've got a topic that is tailor-made for filmmakers to try and explore.

A Good Person is another one of those movies, almost to the level of parody. Writer/director Zach Braff (Garden State, Wish I Was Here) aims to make an emotionally affecting and ultimately heartwarming story about a small circle of people affected in different ways by a tragedy, but as nice of a thought as that is, the movie can't escape feeling it was written by an AI that was fed the many similar movies that have come before it.

What it does have going for it are two A-list leads in Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman. Allison (Pugh), shown to have idyllic future ahead of her, gets in a fatal accident on the eve of her wedding. Most of the movie takes place a year later, where Allison has developed an addiction to OxyContin to manage her physical pain and grief. She is now separated from her former fiancé Nathan (Chinaza Uche), whose own family is struggling to deal with the consequences. Nathan's grandfather (Freeman), who has his own struggles with addiction, is left to try and raise his teenage granddaughter Ryan (Celeste O'Connor).

Everything plays out exactly as you'd expect. The movie wallows in the characters' grief for a good while, and even though the characters resent and even hate each other (and themselves), you can see the seeds of their connection and eventual reconciliation growing. Pugh does her best to portray a woman at rock bottom, and the movie is the most effective when she's the only one in frame, quietly struggling with her demons. Freeman similarly can only do so much with what he's given, mostly giving sage advice about the usefulness of AA meetings and being the stereotypical grandpa who can't believe his teenage granddaughter uses a phone and wants to have sex.

The tropes start to pile up to an excruciating degree, severely impacting the viewer's ability to connect and emphasize with these "good people" whose lives are forever altered by this one terrible event. The characters continue to emote as hard as they can while the requisite soft indie music plays. Nothing feels genuine to the circumstances, as valuable life lessons are constantly extolled with the subtlety of an after-school special.

When the movie starts with Morgan Freeman doing a cute voiceover of greeting card philosophy, it's hard to escape the feeling that you might be headed for two hours of the same trite inevitability. Unfortunately that's exactly what happens, and even the talents of two A-list stars can do nothing to save it.