(courtesy IMP Awards)
There is a perfect world that exists within our own, one where all arguments are settled with a few choice words and a hug, where lovers reunite or unite for the first time despite massive gulfs that might exist between them, and where sadness, grief and loss hit hard but eventually give way, with a montage and the passage of time to a bucolic sense of acceptance and peace.
If you’re wondering where this mystical land of barely consequential or easily remedied pain maybe, look no further than your cinema or streaming service where many, though not all, films bask in the sunny glow of life writ in broken but reasonably easily healed terms.
Were life this easily lived and easily survived.
Alas, it is not, and thank the cinematic gods for the fact that films like Good Grief exist, a movie that looks us straight in the weary, bloodshot eye and says that our pain is real, it is not easily put aside and that there may be more to come before we eventually come to a place of messy, ill-defined and easily flawed acceptance.
What is so liberating about Good Grief, written and directed by Daniel Levy (Schitt’s Creek), is that it doesn’t force us to say everything fine; in fact, at one point, one key character turns to another and begs them to stop saying everything is fine and to admit that people have messed up, terrible things have been done and it’s really not even remotely fine at all.
That conversation in an apartment in Paris marks a key turning point in a beautifully written film that leaves bloodied emotional loose ends everywhere, at least until its affirmingly tidy final scene, and assures that tripping over existential boulders and getting lost in the maze that is grief is something that is normal and what’s more, comes with all kinds of messy outcomes that aren’t easily resolved.
In the film, Levy plays Marc, a children’s book author who works with his husband, Oliver (Luke Evans), the writer of a series of very successful YA books and movies, whose cosily domestic world in London is rounded by the presence of close friends Sophie (Ruth Negga), who’s a bon vivant and semi-narcissist who is due for a reckoning for her recreational drug and alcohol use, and ex-boyfriend Thomas (Himesh Patel) who is feeling like, at 35, like he’s destined to never be The One for someone or to have the gallery he dreams of owning.
Marc and Oliver’s world is one of lavish Christmas parties, lots of love expressed and the strong and sure sense of belonging somewhere deeply permanent and good, and it seems unassailably perfect until one night when Oliver is killed in a car accident and Marc’s world blows widely and grievously apart.
His life then becomes one of endless permutations on grief; first the funeral, which is marked by two eulogies, one hilariously self-serving and the other by Oliver’s adoring dad, Duncan (David Bradley), then sorting out his dead husband’s financial affairs and finally coming to grips with the fact that perhaps everything was not perfectly sunny in the garden of love after all.
Through a year of indescribable pain, sadness, and not a little anger, Marc has to grapple with the very real truth that grief marches to its own individual beat depending on the person, and that in the midst of all that emotional chaos that mistakes will be made and errors of judgement will occur.
What makes Good Grief such a breath of fresh air when it comes to films about grief is that never ever seeks to dovetail its witty, wise and seamlessly perfect narrative into the sort of neat and tidy places real grief would never ever venture.
We want things to get easier and for all the complications of grief to be easily swept away so life as it was before can begin again – that’s one thing that can never happen and coming to grips with that is necessary if you’re ever to be honest with yourself about the grief you’re feeling – but life is rarely that accommodating and the film never pretends for a moment that it is.
It also never sugarcoats how messy relationships generally can be.
While Thomas and Sophie prove themselves to be super supportive friends through the tumultuous year of grieving that defines Marc’s life, they are also flawed and broken people, as is Marc, and as are we all, and as Good Grief progresses, they move closer, fall back until one fateful night in Paris, where Marc spends time with handsome and emotionally insightful Frenchman Theo (Arnaud Valois), when everything comes into the open and everyone realises there is no fairytale ending to love, life or roadblocks on the road to perfect friendship.
Levy’s willingness to be this brave and honest all the way through Good Grief, much of the honesty coming home to roost in the form of Theo who sneaks Marc into Monet’s Room at the Musée de l’Orangerie and explains that Monet painted in his grief, not to escape it, lifts a load of all us who have felt the need to minimise how great a toll grief has taken on us.
The film also cautions us to not distract ourselves from grief with diversionary tactics and a life full of pleasurable moments and things – those things are wonderful to have but not as a way of holding grief at bay; they were never designed for that and will eventually fail – but rather to deal with the full force of grief and to start living again, likely in a wholly different way, out the other side of it.
Though there is a reassuring neatness and hopefulness to Good Grief in its final act, it earns that because the road to that place is one borne of heartache and sadness and the honesty needed to deal with it authentically, and you emerge from this wholly moving and wondrously well-told story feeling understandably sad in some ways but also buoyed by the fact that there is a way through grief and it is hard but it does end and you will find life comes alive in ways you thought were beyond you or had left you behind and that is a good and perfect and worth the pain of that which precedes it.
And now for some interviews and behind-the-scenes stuff …
Interview #1
Interview #2
Interview #3