Patron Pick – All Good Things

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Bekah Lindstrom.

All Good Things (2010)
Written by Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling
Directed by Andrew Jarecki

Just because a recipe looks good on paper does not mean the final dish will be a masterpiece. Let us peruse the ingredients list for All Good Things. The cast is stacked: Ryan Gosling, Kirstin Dunst, Frank Langella, Philip Baker Hall, Nick Offerman, Kristen Wiig, Lily Rabe. Not a bad line-up at all. The cinematographer worked on Alfonso Cuaron’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, among many other films. The director, Andrew Jarecki, had wowed audiences with his documentary Capturing the Friedmans seven years earlier. But it is in this last ingredient we have identified the problem. Jarecki made a fantastic documentary, but that is different from a narrative feature, and this film stands as a great example of how success in one does not translate into the other.

In the 1970s, David Marks (Gosling) meets Katie (Dunst) when he goes to make repairs at one of his father’s many properties in New York City. David’s dad, Sanford (Langella), disapproves of this union, and after they are married and ready to open an antique store in Vermont, he manipulates his son into returning to the city. Katie pivots to wanting to start a family, but David’s untreated mental health issues intensify, leaving his wife wondering what is happening with her husband. Money is used to placate and delay the significant discussions that need to occur until the couple reaches a crisis point. Dark things go down, and we learn why David is like this and how extreme his actions can be.

All Good Things is inspired by the real-life story of real estate heir and convicted murderer Robert Durst. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Andrew Jarecki also directed the HBO documentary series The Jinx, where he directly interviewed Durst. The series led to the arrest of Durst after he confessed while mic’d to one of the murders he’d been accused of. This film shows us why Jarecki should have just done the doc and skipped this tedious & amateurish film venture.

I can’t emphasize how boring All Good Things is. It doesn’t start out too badly, but as the story progresses and we keep shifting locations and making jumps in time, I found myself caring less and less. So many characters are introduced and never developed but reappear at critical moments. I get what happened here. Jarecki was directing this narrative feature like a documentary. There’s copious voice-over from Gosling as David talks about what happened. It’s made into a framing device where he’s questioned by a lawyer. Within the film’s context, that voice-over resembles the snippets of interviews that would be played over documentary footage. It doesn’t allow us to figure anything out, which is what we expect from narrative cinema. Everything is clunky exposition to explain to the audience what exactly is going on.

The editing certainly doesn’t help either; it resembles a Lifetime movie. While Todd Haynes was recently able to take the aesthetic and work it into the incredible May-December, Jarecki cannot ascend that high. You can feel large chunks of the story being dropped because we have to hit specific moments on a timeline. I have no doubt many of these scenes happened as presented in this movie, but that doesn’t mean they work on film. Katie has deeply intimate conversations with people we’ve just been introduced to and I spent half the scene trying to figure out exactly who this person was in relation to her.

Lily Rabe shows up as one of David’s close childhood friends. She has two scenes and doesn’t show up again until the film ends. Kristen Wiig also plays, who I think was one of David’s friends, but becomes close with Katie. Don’t quote me on that. She’s barely in the movie. Yet, she still takes part in a crucial scene where Katie meets with a lawyer about a potential divorce. The only other time she and Katie interacted was in a brief party scene. I suspect a lot of footage got cut, and I will go out on a limb saying keeping it probably wouldn’t have made this picture any better.

There are interesting parts, but many feel they should have been their own movie entirely. When David ends up in Galveston, Texas, and befriends Malvern Bump (Hall), I wanted to spend much more time in this bizarre friendship. It’s too bad, as it’s only about 20 minutes or less of screen time. There’s a great dynamic between the actors that could have been developed. The circumstances of their meeting and how David is living are so strange that you could make a really moody character-focused piece just about that. Jarecki messed up by trying to make the whole story of Durst digestible in this format. It works for a documentary but not for this medium at all.

Gosling reminds us he’s very good at playing a disturbed person. Dunst has good energy and creates a character we’re rooting for. It’s a shame these actors had such a shoddy script and a director taking his first steps at making this type of movie. Dunst especially feels like an actress who has yet to entirely find THE film role, the things that elevate her from an outstanding supporting performance to a lead. The Power of the Dog was close to that, but she still has a truly fantastic performance to give.

Gosling has proven himself an incredibly charming movie star who can do exciting things with a quirky role. Much of this plays to his strengths, so a movie about David and Malvern would have been excellent. Imagine that part of the picture expanded into its own film, a minimalist A24-style psychological character piece. It would have been incredible in the hands of the right director. Instead, Jarecki directs this whole thing like it is a documentary. It’s a shame but a great reminder of how specific the skills are for one type of movie over another.