"A Good Person" - Review

Allison (Florence Pugh) has a perfect life, but when all that crashes around her, and she finds herself seemingly at her lowest point, she forms an unlikely relationship with retired ex-cop Daniel (Morgan Freeman) and others...

I'm not sure that I can ever accept anybody's assertions that Marvel movies are jarring in their tone, whiplash and constant quips. At least, not whilst this hipster bullshit exists. Zacharus Braffacus has created not a film, but an amalgamation of the worst impulses of shoe-gazing, indie-adjacent sanitised nonsense; bloated and RUTHLESS with its running time, whilst simultaneously having nothing of importance to say or offer to the world. Like a Jake Bugg album made manifest: its emptiness is matched only by its pretentious swings at things of importance, and the delusions that it is "important" or even noteworthy, he thinks he's the next Jim Jarmusch with a political bent, but in actual fact is more like Vincent Gallo with a budget.
We follow the wrong character, Florence Pugh's drug addicted, survivor's guilt ridden Pharmaceutical Sales Rep (we get it, Zack, you were in "Scrubs", how cute a gag) not as a character or a harrowing portrait of addiction, but a fetishistic view of a hip cool, indie girl he REALLY wants to fuck (she wears Nick Cave t-shirts and has fun quippy facts to spout off whilst being self-deprecating. I'm pretty sure he thinks that "Juno" is a documentary), and who is broken but able to be fixed if the right thing comes along! It's like misery-porn, but he pussies out and can't even do that right: his attempts at swinging at the very real opioid epidemic in America are weak, limp and run out of steam halfway through, he lacks the stomach, clarity and basic fucking knowledge to pull it off. In something like, say, "Animals" (a fantastic effort by David Dastmalchian) we see the suffering, horror, grimness, grime, and yet genuine humanity through it all. Braff resorts to hysterical flushings of pills and weak, pathetic insults from a crack smoking school acquaintance played by Alex Wolff, who is admittedly welcome.
Where those he tries to emulate (Jim Jarmusch, Joe Swanberg, Amy Seimetz, Kelly Reichardt, David Gordon Green) will happily make an engaging film of vignettes and "days in the life" of characters told through little moments or odd encounters and make it enthralling and be in the service of an arc or plot; Zachariah Braffariah has missed the memo, and resorts to mumbling, shoegazing and a BLOATED middle act. His worst impulses and tendencies come out in the dialogue, which schizophrenically flickers between excerpts from "Juno", quippy one liners, faux-philosophical fortune-cookie poetry, and attempts to get the scene moving. The beginning (wherein our heroine plays piano and sings at her own engagement party) has particularly cringe-worthy exposition and clunky first-draft film student poetry; but is preceded by a 30 second Morgan Freeman narration about how model trains are different to real life in that you can control it all; and is then followed by vaguely sketched, bareley registered sitcom-level dialogue in the car. It continues this whiplash all the way through, and despite a dedicated (I wouldn't say good) performance from Pugh, the script is atrocious. Morgan Freeman is Morgan Freeman: you hire him, you get him, but again, we follow the wrong character in these proceedings, and there was a moment when I thought: "If they make him a magical old black man who changes her, I'm walking", and to be fair I almost walked out after the train monologue at the start.
And if you think his dialogue is bad, his plotting and editing are worse. My particular favourite was her in the bar, speaking with the junkies, getting high, feeling bad, and the camera cutting to a pinball machine reading: "I Am Invincible".
Transcendental, next level shit from Zachigan Braffigan. The Truffaut of our time.
As a positive, Celeste O'Connor is in this, and I like them as an actor.
Cannot recommend, unless you have a party and need the guests to leave, in which case put this on and they will IMMEDIATELY evacuate the building.