All Good Things
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All Good Things
Director: Andrew Jarecki
Writers: Marcus Hinchey, Marc Smerling
Stars: Ryan Gosling, Kirsten Dunst and Frank Langella
Katie: "I've never been closer to anyone and I don't know you at all."
Stars: Ryan Gosling, Kirsten Dunst and Frank Langella
Katie: "I've never been closer to anyone and I don't know you at all."
Following the paradigm of a newspaper, "All Good Things" keeps your attention like an intriguing, sinister article. Marking his territory, the director, Andrew Jarecki ("Capturing the Friedmans"), once again sticks his nose in a dysfunctional man whose family were oblivious to his true nature. But does the tabloid's cinematic dramatization overstuffs the psychological impact it brings on the reader?
David Marks (Ryan Gosling) or maybe Robert Durst is an heir to his father's golden goose real-estate business in midtown New York. Oppressive expectations have already risen but David shuts the door behind him. All it takes for Sanford Marks (Frank Langella), the father, to make his mark, is a toast to success.
Under Katie's (Kirsten Dunst) sink, David finds an escape route, a walk with her all the way down to meeting her down-to-earth family, intimacy in logistic terms and finally marriage.
"All Good Things" is a health-food store, a small one, selling pies, ice-cream and everything seems peachy and clean. Not for long in the eyes of his menacing father who in order to lure him back in the business, presses his well-hidden button, his mother's suicide, a beautiful woman just like his wife, he stresses.
But what is amiss? "Is there something wrong with you?" Katie asks but David is a hunted animal trying to walk away in silence from his dogmatic father's admonishments. The void inside him brings out the monster desperate for emotional and physical occupation in sadistic ways. Huffing and puffing and demanding for more, his soul is still left on that pavement along with his mother's dead body.
The dimly lit Ryan Gosling is exploring the inner sightings of an ambiguous figure retreating to practical madness in more ways than one. He manages to pull a few tricks up his sleeve from a lackluster script, frightened to describe the animosity of its tortured character's calm aggressiveness.
The vibrant return of Kirsten Dunst is caving in on the transformation from a cheerful free-spirited girl to a devastated woman interwoven with despair. An excellent performance in a script that does not pay much attention to her character.
While the filmmaker's wildly swerving train of thought did at one point flirt with coherence, past the midway point, David draws back and we're left in unfamiliar territory. Mixed feelings and a muddled viewpoint clears the premise's fog but it seems like a chance that was given to the script from the actors rather than a result of rudimentary lucidity from the screenwriters.
Andrew Jarecki never decided what his movie should be. A diary in documentaristic form or a pulp horror drama which condemns his protagonist in eternal hell. "All Good Things" leave aesthetically too many things in the open by mashing them up in a jigsaw puzzle like scraps from yesterday's newspapers.
What is a nightmare without a bizarre reality surrounding it? The descent to the corridors of David's mind resembles an unengaged conversation between friends, over coffee and tabloid articles, about the abnormal psychology of serial killers.
