In America, self-medication has practically become a point of pride. We don’t need to be told that she’s self-medicating neither does Ally or her mother, Diane (Molly Shannon), in whose home she’s now living. And the way she sees it, she has every right to her pills - the sky-blue Ox圜ontin painkillers she started taking for her injuries and has been popping ever since. Ally has every right to her trauma, and to her guilt. Did that make the accident her fault? Maybe so, but you could put that question another way: Who of us hasn’t stolen a look at a cell-phone map for two seconds while driving along the highway?Ĭut to a year later. The loss of life is staggering, but what hovers over the movie (even though, smartly, it doesn’t bring up the subject until much later on) is that Ally looked away from the road. Ally is laying in a hospital bed with a serious head injury. A bulldozer on a road-construction site to her left lifts its shovel into the highway, and the next thing you know…well, we don’t see the accident, but we cut to its aftermath. Ally is at the wheel, and as their plans are forming she takes out her phone to glance, for a moment, at a map. Ally sells wholesale pharmaceutical drugs for a living, and feels a bit guilty about it, but she’s a soulful (if non-professional) piano player and singer, and her party rendition of the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours” is an ideal mood-setter.Ī scene or two later, she and her future sister-in-law, Molly (Nichelle Hines), and Molly’s husband, Jesse (Toby Onwumere), are driving into New York City for a shopping expedition and possible theater outing. We’ve just been to the engagement party of Ally ( Florence Pugh) and Nathan (Chinaza Uche), who live in New Jersey and are radiantly in love. Talk about happiness crashing and burning. But “A Good Person,” early on, has a scene that’s a sophisticated version of the auto-accident-out-of-the-blue disaster, and it’s remarkably effective. That cliché has become an assaultive and overly programmed way of doling out The Hand Of Fate. If there’s any movie cliché I’d be glad never to see again, it’s the one where you’re watching happy characters for the first 5 or 10 minutes, and they’re driving in a car, and then - BASH!! - a huge vehicle comes out of nowhere and sideswipes them, and so much for happiness. It’s a story of lives that have been frozen by tragedy, and of how the unfreezing happens. It’s not a melodrama about scraping bottom. The movie creates a highly specific situation - about its heroine, and about an entire family - that it carries right through. Yet beneath the middlebrow situational conventionality, there’s a core of raw feeling and truth to it. It’s an addiction drama that has scenes you can bicker with, a few contrivances, and other peccadilloes. “ A Good Person,” the fourth feature written and directed by Zach Braff (and the best one that he has made since his first, “Garden State,” in 2004), is exactly that kind of movie. What it does need to do is tell the truth about itself - to not cut corners, to make the trauma of its characters honest and relatable. A good addiction drama doesn’t have to be art, any more than therapy is art. That’s why when you’re watching one, you can be aware of the emotions it’s manipulating, even the buttons it’s pushing, and still be drawn in and moved by it. And dramas of addiction, like “Clean and Sober” or “The Way Back,” have so many rhyming touchstones of behavior that they almost become a kind of therapy for the viewer. We live in a profoundly addictive society whether or not you, I, or anyone else happens to be an “addict,” we all carry shadings of the addictive temperament. The ritual, when it comes to this topic, extends to the audience.
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