Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Good Person’ on Prime Video, A Contrived Melodramatic Comedy That Florence Pugh Can’t Quite Save

Zach Braff taps into some Garden State vibes with his fourth directorial effort, A Good Person (now streaming on Prime Video). The movie stars his ex Florence Pugh as a woman in a personal tailspin, taking pills and looking in the mirror a lot, both to the tune of tasteful indie rock – a lot like Braff’s character did in the aforementioned movie that everyone loved for a while and then everyone hated for a while and now everyone kind of shrugs at as a Thing of a Moment (from nearly 20 years ago now, if anyone out there wants to feel all old about it). One thing Pugh is absolutely not in A Good Person is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, which shows some progress, although there’s an overt anti-glam element to her character that tends to be distracting. But she’s the kind of talented actor who can fight through things like that and make something out of a movie that would be far inferior without her – case in point!

A GOOD PERSON: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Morgan Freeman does voiceover in A Good Person, which makes one wonder if his boilerplate movie contracts designate that his soothing timbre MUST accompany any profound (or pseudo-profound) scenes, lest he turn down the gig. In this case, the scene is a bit on the pseudo side, as we see images of a model town and train set, and Freeman delivers an overwrought explanation of how it’s a metaphor for the life he’d wish to live if he could control everything rather than submitting to the will of fate. Cut to: The engagement party of Allison (Pugh) and Nathan (Chinaza Uche). She sings and plays piano for friends and family. Later, she and Nathan snuzzle and snog in bed – they have a rapport and chemistry, and they’re in love, very much so. The next day, she’s driving Nathan’s sister and her husband to try on some wedding dresses. Allison picks up her phone for a split second and then there’s a screech and a crash. Elsewhere, Daniel (Freeman) is about to drop off his teen granddaughter Ryan (Celeste O’Connor) at school when his phone rings. He holds it in, just barely, as Ryan gets out of the car. In the hospital, Allison wakes up bruised and battered. Her mother, Diane (Molly Shannon), is distraught. Nathan looks dazed. Police reps step into the room. They have procedures to follow when there’s been fatalities.

ONE YEAR LATER. Allison follows along with a chirpy YouTuber who’s teaching all her followers to cut their own hair. She chops away. The curtains are closed, the TV is on, the place is disheveled, she’s pasty and pale, her wardrobe ranges from frumpy to sloporama to Work-From-Home Drug Dealer In A Tarantino Movie. She lives with her mother now. Allison used to be a pharmaceutical rep, but now she’s on the other side of it, very much so: She’s hooked on oxycontin. Diane comes home and they have a blowout. Diane hid the pills and Allison wants them then Allison finds them but Diane wrestles them away from her and flushes them down the toilet. That’s the last prescription. The doctors said she needs to “wean off” the oxy. Allison doesn’t drive anymore, so she hops on her bike and tries to shake down the pharmacist, which doesn’t work. And so it gets worse, as she tries to blackmail a former coworker for some, and ends up behind a skeezy bar smoking crack with a couple of ex-schoolmates who always thought she was a snob. As for Nathan? He’s out of the picture, apparently moving on with his life elsewhere.

Allison’s life isn’t the only one in pieces. Ryan lives with her grandfather, who doesn’t know the first thing about raising a 21st-century teenager – especially one contending with the trauma of being suddenly, violently orphaned. She’s a star soccer player, but her focus is waning; she keeps getting in fights; her grades are slipping. There’s an incident where we see a different side of Daniel: He finds Ryan in bed with a boy, and Daniel pins the kid to the wall and nearly chokes him out. Daniel opens up his cabinet, finds the bottle of whiskey, opens it, sets it on the table and frowns really hard at it. Meanwhile, Allison bicycles herself to a church, pulls out one oxy tablet, bites half of it off, swallows and goes inside. It’s an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. And Daniel is there. Daniel, who shouldn’t have outlived his daughter, and should’ve been Allison’s father-in-law, and shouldn’t have done those terrible things he did back when he was a drunk. Awkward acknowledgments ensue. Allison tries to leave, but he entices her to stay. It’s hard enough to get to one of these meetings in the first place, and it might just be time to work through some stuff. If only it were so simple.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Garden State, of course – although credit where it’s due, as Braff doesn’t try to duplicate that success, although tonally, it feels quite simlar. And the last time I saw Freeman narrate and star in an at-times histrionic, intensely emotional dramedy was Feast of Love, a movie most everyone else forgot existed, for good reason. 

Performance Worth Watching: As she did in Don’t Worry Darling, Pugh gives a disheveled mediocrity like A Good Person a performance it likely doesn’t deserve. She and Freeman – an old pro at Elevating The Material – have a way of cutting through the clutter to find some core truth about their characters. 

Memorable Dialogue: Allison tries to order a Jack and Coke at breakfast, and is told that the bar doesn’t open this early in the morning. So she orders coffee then initiates a very ugly exchange with her breakfast companion. 

Waiter, delivering coffee: Take it. I mixed in a little tequila for you.

Allison takes a sip: That’s disgusting. Thank you.

Sex and Skin: Nothing you wouldn’t see on basic cable in the ’90s.

Our Take: Pugh and Freeman find the substance of this story wherever they can. When they share scenes, A Good Person feels like it’s getting somewhere – Daniel and Allison talk, show vulnerability, voice their concerns and regrets, dispense well-intentioned advice. It’s when the actors find and share the hearts of their characters. She was the thing in the title of the movie, and is possibly becoming less of one. He is the title of the thing in the movie, although there was a time when he wasn’t. Theirs is an unlikely friendship, thorny as it can be, and Pugh and Freeman make it believable.

Far less believable are the contrivances Braff, directing his own screenplay, routinely forces upon his characters. He tends to dole out irony, metaphor and sentimentality by the bulldozer bucketful, lacing the faux-weighty drama with clunky stabs at comedy, leading to an overly bombastic third-act climax that’s harder to swallow than a fistful of nuts and bolts. And that toy-train symbolism rigamarole — painstakingly building that halcyonic false reality is Daniel’s lifelong basement hobby — lands right on the nose with a very heavy hand. See, a life without pain, grief and regret is just tiny plastic people frozen in time in a model town where a train occasionally buzzes by, a train that represents how Life Goes On. And Allison can either hop on or stand pat, stuck in this horrific moment. It’s not that we don’t want her to get on board and become a better human being – we’d rather do it without the writer of the movie making their presence known with such mawkish and quasi-profundity. 

Our Call: A Good Person is well-intentioned and offers admirable, fully committed performances by Pugh and Freeman, but its A Bit Muchness too often derails the train. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.