Good Grief
Good Grief
The best description of Levy is that he is very talented when it comes to acting – which is making her come across as so likable and approachable- this warms people to they fail sometimes quite badly to discriminate between the two as is the case in with “Good Grief”, a bland yet touchy focused analysis on the effects of grief, in which a few themes developed in it looks to be quite over the edge. However, in the course of the well-cast mix of ‘do not go there’ and ‘that is all the work’ angle, when such characters are allowed to go about their being quite readily enhances Levy’s now latent qualities as a director, making it a great springboard for the astounding Emmy winner into films even as he trusts that his actors in succeeding films will be able to work harder than he would.
Dan Levy had such great success from the sitcom “Schitt’s Creek” that it is natural to think that it was not an easy task to redefine his career. HInce, it’s quite reasonable to say that it is not a coincidence that the subject of his succeeding first feature film as a director is the very subject of moving forward – what comes after a major event, any major event, has in fact, closed, whether one wants it or not.
“Good Grief” begins with Marc (Levy) and his husband Oliver (Luke Evans), a bestselling writer of books made into huge box office hits like The Hunger Games or The Twilight series. It was so famous that, for his book promotion seated in its audience that very day he had to leave the gathering earlier and driven off in his limousine which explains why poor Marc is holding a Christmas party all by himself. Lights going off on responding units to the car crash that ends Oliver’s life send Marc into grief spirals. Marc has been here before, he says, remembering how at the early parts of the film he was still he was brought to his mother’s death when he began dating Oliver. It is also something that Marc does, self-labeling himself now a widower and an orphan which he does early on about his status. The best aspects of “Good Grief” say that it is not a defense mechanism, rather intent on understanding and making others understand that moment in extreme simplifications.
The true intense moment in “Good Grief” is that a year after the death of Oliver when Marc finds the courage to open one of the Christmas cards he had received a year earlier. This, however, would mean that the contents had Oliver revealing some secrets about his infidelities while adding that he was interested in discussing the prospects of their relationship. How does loss morph when it comes into contact with treachery? A few other plot spins and Marc discovers that Oliver had an apartment in Paris, of which he was going to meet his lover at night and on that night he was murdered. To alleviate some of the emotional constraints, Marc travels to France with a couple of his best friends, Sophie Ruth Negga and Thomas Himesh Patel. This is a couple whose lives have been somewhat turbulent in their own representative ways but genuinely only wish peace for their friend sans the knowledge that he is heading for this weird trip for a “movie”.
Levy has stated that he wished to tell a story of a family, even though this particular element is largely satisfied through the always great performances from Negga and Patel, it is also one of the shortcomings as far as the script is concerned in that these characters are not there whenever they need to be as much as they should. Sure, they get their share of growth arcs, but for the most part, they are reflections of Marc, as is a new relationship that now develops in Paris between Marc and other characters, which is where the film starts becoming slow. There’s no denying that the urge to put a new love interest in the picture for Marc is justified. Yet it seems too contrived; providing him a new way of distancing himself from old loves as he embraces new, when a more adventurous approach would’ve been allowing him to look for the column’s titular love on his own accord. More often than not, Levin’s script sounds just as disoriented and directionless due to excesses and/or shortages of plot, as does Marc.
Furthermore, “Good Grief” suffers from the same affliction in how it saturates itself in its lead’s sadness, and that is why spon and temporis, or Sophie and Thomas, seem imaginary as they are only measuring shadows of Marc. This is that movie where a character switches on the Neil Young number, Only love can break your heart, and it is the kind of a thing that carries deep sense but hey, the point is quite a weak one. To be frank, this ‘Good Grief’ ideal was, with some sequeals in the eighth grade level, even a period of episodes purge fully purging even the simple romances, alas, isn’t and stays stagnant in this one discarding such that emphasizing gradualism and in between getting out to radical expansion that realism even such one can touch in two color in a such unemotional area.
But then again, for some audiences, connect with these disjointed characters might even be sufficient. Once more, in the good reviews, I wonder how that the next period, the Levy will look, while I watched Ruth Negga, if she’s in general any of the rubbish. ‘Good Grief’ works best when it allows its actors to do what they do best. And for too much of the time, it’s jolly good.
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- Genre: Comedy, Romance
- Country: United States
- Director: Dan Levy
- Cast: Dan Levy, Ruth Negga, Luke Evan, Himesh Patel, Celia Imrie, Arnaud Valois
