“A Good Person” was written and directed by Zach Braff, who’s still fondly remembered for his 2004 hit “Garden State” in which he starred with Natalie Portman. After an immensely annoying and cloying beginning, “A Good Person” eventually hits its stride and turns into a movie you definitely should not miss. It’s a deeply felt meditation on the ravages of opioid addiction, featuring dramatic heavy hitters Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman.
The aforementioned cloying opening scene is the engagement party of Allison (Florence Pugh) and Nathan (Chinaza Uche). It drips with sentimentality, but it’s a necessary setup for the gut punch of what comes next.
Namely, while driving the New Jersey Turnpike to look at wedding dresses (all Zach Braff’s movies are set in New Jersey; it’s his niche), Allison glances too long at her phone traffic app and neglects to hit the brakes in time to avoid a construction-zone backhoe. The resulting crash puts her in the hospital, and puts her passengers (her fiancé’s sister and brother-in-law) in the grave. She wakes up in the hospital to hear the horrific news.
Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fire
A year later, Allison’s life is, naturally, a mess. She’s fled the engagement with Nathan, lives with her mother, Diane (a rarely seen and excellent dramatic-mode Molly Shannon), and swiftly succumbs to grief self-medication via her pain-management OxyContin. When Allison’s prescription runs out and she spirals into addict behavior of the theft and blackmail variety, Diane attempts to intervene and flushes the last of her daughter’s little blue pills down the toilet. Allison then goes full-on addict, chugging whatever alcohol-containing liquid she can find in the medicine cabinet, and mashing and snorting any pill in there, too, that might proffer a high.
Collateral Damage
Meanwhile, Ryan (Celeste O’Connor), who is Nathan’s orphaned, soccer-playing niece, is obviously having trouble adjusting to high school with no parents. She’s had to start living with her grandfather, Daniel (Morgan Freeman in extreme avuncular mode), an ex-cop.Daniel’s struggling to figure out how to raise a teenager in the 2020s, when he’s required to do things like throw some random young man’s clothes out the window after discovering him in bed with Ryan, and then figure out how to talk to her about birth control. Daniel’s a recovering alcoholic with 10 years of sobriety. A formerly mean drunk, he was abusive to his son Nathan, which is why they don’t speak.
All of this compounded stress eventually sends Daniel back to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, where he bumps into Allison, who has just commenced her recovery and redemption journey through the 12 steps. Daniel blames her for killing his family members but makes a massive effort to put anger and resentment behind him and be of service to her in her rocky entry into the program. “Don’t run away now because of me,” he says, pointing out it’s likely no coincidence that she chose that particular meeting out of the hundreds of other meeting options.
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
Freeman, per his general standard of excellence, brings quiet dignity and desperation to a role more nuanced than it first appears. One captivating aspect is Daniel’s form of personal therapy: an elaborate basement electric train set, which allows him to stage scenes from earlier in his life. As he explains: “For the model train enthusiast, we lord over a world where the neighbors are always kind, the lovers always end up together, and the trains always take you to the far-off places you always swore you’d go. In life, of course, nothing is nearly as neat and tidy.”This type of miniature world-building hobby along with other such 1930s, ‘40s, and ’50s hobbies like plane and automobile model building, and coin and stamp collecting, are from a wistfully bygone era of Americana, but it’s fascinating to step back in time with Daniel and see how time-consuming and sophisticated such setups were.
In this dark time of rampant opioid addiction in America, “A Good Person” offers hope as Daniel and Allison set out on their healing journey, comforted by not having to be alone in their grief. This is thankfully not a New Jersey rendition of the powerful and excruciating, no-happy-ending “Requiem for a Dream.” It also underlines the fact that underlying, unresolved grief and depression are always at the root of virulent addiction.
Pugh is wrenching as Allison, whose future is eclipsed by a tragedy resulting from a few seconds of texting-and-driving. And had the movie been released in, say, October, her performance (as well as Freeman’s and possibly Celeste O’Connor’s) might have come with “Oscar-worthy” descriptions attached.
