A Good Person

Writer/director Braff takes Florence Pugh's 'good person who has done a bad thing' on an contrived journey towards self-forgiveness.

In his dual capacity as writer and director, Zach Braff here puts us through an ordeal of excruciating contrived nonsense: a masturbatory Calvary of ersatz empathy and emotional wellness. Braff puts us through a gruelling “relapse” montage as Allison hits the pills again after an illusory breakthrough and then a “recovery” montage as she gets it together. And the film’s single valuable lesson – the one about not looking at your phone while driving – is all but forgotten.

Zach Braff's 'A Good Person,' starring Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman, explores addiction and maturity in a way that Braff hasn't before.

Another unusual scene late in the film finds Allison, Daniel, and Ryan at a party, and Braff is so focused on getting us to the party that he’s forgotten to explain why so many other characters from this cast just happen to find this location as well, popping up without any rationale. Yet it’s when Braff unites these two sides that A Good Person really soars, as we see Allison attempt to make penance for her actions, while Nathan does his best to move past the incident that changed his life. For example, we early on meet Allison and Nathan at their engagement party, and watching these two together and with their friends has an awkward tone to it that seems like Braff not knowing how to present these characters until after the tragedy strikes. Similarly, Daniel has been raising Ryan since her mother’s death, and with Ryan acting out in school and having sex with a boy far too old for her, it’s been a lot to deal with. The quote says “blissfully have I been lost in a world of my own creation,” and while we’ll come to learn that this is true of Daniel’s experience with this miniature world he’s made, this also could be true of the previous films Braff has written and directed. Allison takes Nathan’s sister and her partner into New York City to look at wedding dresses, and after looking at her phone's map for a second, she gets in a crash that kills the couple.

No matter how Florence Pugh continues to rise to the challenge, "A Good Person's" cascading of contrivances drown her out, writes reviewer Chase Hutchinson.

One of the few times Allison seems to be at peace is when she is swimming, something she did when she was younger. Though she moves to flee, he persuades her to stay and the two begin to form a tentative friendship. At the core of this, one scene with Pugh feels most indicative of the film’s problems. Following the troubled Allison (Pugh) as she tries to get sober and rebuild her life as the sole survivor of a fatal car accident from a year prior, it has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Dragged down by increasingly melodramatic escalations that soon become disastrous, it does a disservice to both the seriousness of the subject and its cast who do all they can to salvage it. Played by Celeste O’Connor of the recent horror film “Freaky,” she has big aspirations though is struggling through tough times at school made all the more difficult by the loss of her mother.

Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman star in "A Good Person," directed by Zach Braff, about a woman who survives a car crash.

After a chaotic trip into the city to save Ryan from a scary party in Williamsburg tests the limits of their friendship, it’s Daniel and not Ali who delivers the titular line, “I’m a good person.” Whatever journey this befuddled character was carrying has been co-opted, albeit by a very kindly older gentleman. Though their relationship is by far the most interesting in the film, “A Good Person” loses whatever sense of purpose it had when the focus splits so dramatically toward Daniel and Ryan. Though the film is meant to be Ali’s journey, Braff gives Daniel a whole back story about his father’s alcoholism, his own failures as a father, and — what else? While driving into the city to try on wedding dresses with her soon-to-be sister-in-law and her husband, Ali looks down briefly at her maps app before noticing a construction vehicle about to swing into traffic. [Florence Pugh](https://www.indiewire.com/t/florence-pugh/), who finds herself stuck in the throes of opioid addiction after surviving a fatal car crash in which she was the driver. The film opens with an obvious metaphor about model trains that is very quickly hammered into the ground, along with a few too many other themes and plot lines.

Florence Pugh plays a New Jersey 20-something whose life is upended when she gets into a car crash that kills her future sister-in-law and brother-in-law ...

“A Good Person” seems to belong to a uniquely Dan Fogelman-esque subgenre of hyper sincere melodrama that sometimes clicks (“This Is Us”) and other times does not (“Life Itself”). She tries to flee, but he encourages her to stay and the two develop a tenuous friendship leading to some nice moments between Pugh and Freeman, who has his own world of regret and guilt to grapple with. And yet there are enough moments of grace and threads that defy the obvious cliche to keep you interested, even if you're not wholly buying or invested in every character. This time, he wanted to write about grief, which was the birth of “A Good Person,” an ensemble piece about tragedy, mourning, addiction, forgiveness and people who keep messing up despite their best intentions. In Zach Braff’s “ A Good Person,” Pugh is a New Jersey 20-something named Allison whose life is upended in a flash. She so consistently delivers the best version of whatever she’s handed — whether good, mediocre or downright preposterous — that you may even start to wonder if the quality of the film around her really matters in the end.