Grief is a greatly misunderstood state of being.
In many movies and TV shows, it almost comes across as a minor inconvenience, a speed bump on the freeway of life, which slows you down and interrupts the natural flow of things, and which, once bested or resolved, is left behind in the rear view mirror with no lasting impact.
But, and all these automotive and driving allusions will soon make more sense, it’s often far more muscularly damaging and all-invasive than that, a dark place where love makes one final stand to be remembered for being something damn special.
We see how all encompassing it can be in the Zach Braff written and directed, A Good Person, which may not necessarily get everything right but which absolutely mails the devastating impact great loss can have on a person and how you don’t simply bounce back like some sort of inspirational bumper sticker sprung to emotionally triumphant life.
If anyone could have the wherewithal to brush off grief and move on – assuming that’s possible, which patently unrealistic rosy fictional tales, it is not – it would be Allison (Florence Pugh), a highly successful young woman with a career on the rise, a blissfully happy relationship with Nathan (Chinaza Uche), to whom she’s engaged, and a life trajectory that fairly screams everything is going to come up roses.
And then one day, on her way to try on wedding dresses with her sister-in-law Molly (Nichelle Hines) and brother-in-law Jesse (Toby Onwumere), Allison is distracted for a fraction of a second resulting in a cataclysmic car accident that leaves her badly injured and her two passengers dead.
We see the terrifyingly sad moment when she is told what’s happened, and the a year later where she is living back with her doting but oddly overwrought mother Diane (Molly Shannon) in the small, go-nowhere New Jersey town she had always been so sure she would escape.
With grief well and truly holding her in its corrosive grip, and in a sense, understandably so since she has suffered loss so painful and overwhelmingly life excoriating that she has no idea how to process or respond it, Allison has a prescription painkiller addiction, no job and apparently no Nathan, driven away you assume by the fact that his fiancée accidentally killed his sister and brother-in-law, parents of his perky, scholarly successful niece Ryan (Celeste O’Connor) who is being raised by her maternal grandfather Daniel (Morgan Freeman) who is dealing with some significant demons of his own.
In this far from rosy world, Allison is struggling to make any kind of headway; she has sent Nathan, who was prepared to stand by her, packing, lost any and all career prospects and seems destined to become the junkee-type figure she once derided, somewhat cruelly, in high school.
No one in A Good Person really emerges from this desperately harrowing moment in their lives with victory over pain and grief held firmly in their hands; instead, they all struggle, and mightily with an authenticity that crushes your heart with how real it is, to come out the other side of the wall of grief that subsumes them, patently unable to remake life as it once was.
But then, that’s the point of this whole sad story which doesn’t pretend life has a reset button or a do-over functionality which allows you to brush off the pain that has taken you over and move on to bigger and better things.
That’s an addictively seductive thought, and movies with that alluring idea at their centre always do well because as a species we want to believe you can leave grief behind so easily with so few lingering effects, but it’s not realistic with recovery taking far longer, on a far less linear path and with more backward steps than of us would like to admit or contemplate.
While A Good Person does slow down a little to much in certain places, its greatest strength, apart from brilliantly moving and endlessly impressive performances by Pugh and Freeman who are superb every step of the way, is that it doesn’t sugarcoat how dark place can be.
It does celebrate the fact, in halting, broken moments that eventually cohere and begin to reflect hope and possibility, that life can be rebuilt and reborn and you can take steps away from subsuming grief, but on the way to that slowly-realised place, which is cautiously good, it allows the full spread of grief to let its effects be made plain.
Rather than feel like a great crushing weight on your viewing soul, A Good Person deftly takes you into a world where four key people – Allison, Daniel, Ryan and Nathan – have to figure out, and imperfectly in that flawed way that real humans do, how they navigate a grief so profound, and this is not all flowing from the accident with some past pain stirred up by it, that it makes the business of living feel all but impossible.
It isn’t necessarily but when you’re in the midst of it, and all the deleterious consequences that flow from it, that’s exactly how it feels, like hope has flown from you never to return, and A Good Person doesn’t pretend this isn’t the case, letting the grief run its course even at times if it all like its a thousand steps back and only one or two staggering ones forward.
If you have gone through grief, you will respond to how this all how feels, and even if you haven’t fallen into a prescription painkiller hole or flushed your academic potential temporarily down the toilet like Allison and Ryan respectively do, you will find much with which to identify in a story that never ever pretends that you can just get back from being knocked on your emotional arse and simply keep on walking forward.
That’s impossible, at least in the way inspirational movies-of-the-week like to portray it, and A Good Person doesn’t pretend otherwise, offering up hope and connection but tempered by the fact that getting back out into the sun takes hard work, setbacks and inevitable mistakes, which, like grief and hope, are all parts of being human and which don’t always follow the script we would like, taking their time to get there in a way that leaves us reeling at first but eventually, in the right time, hopeful we can get somewhere good again and finally, in a way that feels real and lasting, leave grief behind us.