Last week I saw the trailer for India Donaldson’s Good One for the first time. Running before Blink Twice, at first it looked like a cookie-cutter dad/daughter quiet crisis movie, but halfway through some boys are introduced, and it becomes really ambiguous, never quite tipping over into the absurd lurches of other trailers that first suggest a comedy and then a horror movie—it’s all in intonation and gesture, the way James Le Gros asks of his daughter Lily Collias, “Can’t we just have a good day?” That line is what Good One is about, and the trailer’s as much a feat as the movie itself, if not more-so; it was also shocking to see so many people, mostly couples skewing older, at the Charles on Friday night. They’ve returned to movie theaters, but who’s telling them? Which one gave this movie a good review, NPR or the Times?
Le Gros, divorced, and Collias have a strained but active relationship, while Danny McCarthy plays another divorced dad with a son who really hates him—he bails on the hiking trip, so McCarthy is third-wheeling with them. Those boys from the trailer do show up right around the half-hour mark, and, proportionally, they stay for as long as they do in the trailer, just people passing through with a mutual passing interest in Collias. But nothing ever comes of it besides glances, air, and atmosphere; to involve them any further would turn Good One into a more familiar kind of movie, one where the disinterested and straying daughter is plucked or piqued by these boys her age (maybe a little older).
The film could’ve also dealt more with the divorces of both dads, but besides a few comments and a brief appearance at the beginning, it’s never talked about, much less belabored. No one exorcises their trauma, no even vents; Good One is a remarkably realistic film about families, with people failing and coming up short with no resolution. McCarthy comes onto Collias one night, and even after struggling to get the words out and tell her dad, he shrugs her off, “He’s always saying weird stuff.” “Yeah, but this was weird stuff about me.” Up until he asks Collias to keep him warm, McCarthy’s a mostly amiable sad sack, not entirely capable but not a jerk, just a loser. But that comment, and how embarrassing it is for both of them, peaks into a vein of American darkness regularly experienced in life second or third-hand, but rarely in movies.
The audience has been conditioned too to expect Le Gros to get violent, or at least incredibly angry; another movie would’ve had the climax featuring two men fighting over a cliff while a teen girl yelled at them to stop. Another might’ve figured the boys into the ending, or at least used them as more than a grace note, as something other than what they were: real people just passing through.
The climax of Good One is Le Gros responding to Collias’ concerns with, “Can’t we just have a good day?” That’s it. That's great.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @nickyotissmith