There may not be Be a movie with more BDE energy (Brooklyn Dad Energy) good one —You have to go to a Park Slope bar at closing time with nothing but The National on the jukebox to find a more concentrated dose of fatherly moodiness than writer-director Indira Donaldson’s feature debut. The fact that this low-key, low-key drama is filtered not through a male lens but through that of a 17-year-old girl, who witnesses two middle-aged men navigating their midlife crises and sees through their bullshit doesn’t make it any less heartbreaking and depressing. It also doesn’t let these men off the hook, which is how Donaldson refines her masterpiece, Men with Feelings in the Woods. Old Joy As a parable about coming of age, this parable strikes a balance between compassion and cruelty, making it both poignant and painful.
The teenage tour guide on this journey into the woods and through emotional minefields is Sam (newcomer Lily Callias, Discovery of the Century ), a Bed-Stuy girl about to leave for college. She’s going on a hiking trip in the Catskills with her father, Chris (James Le Gros). His old friend Matt (Danny McCarthy), and Matt’s son, are supposed to join them. But the boy pulls out at the last minute, leaving Sam to play third wheel at what has now become an impromptu guys’ weekend. Matt used to be an actor, best known for a small recurring role on a TV series. Now this cynical, slightly gruff artist is just another divorced man living in the city, drowning in booze and self-pity. He and Chris banter and bicker about life choices, consequences, and the paths they didn’t take. Sam checks her phone, rolls her eyes, and occasionally offers a snarky comment. She mostly just sits there, silently taking it all in.
Danny McCarthy and James Le Gros in “Good One”.
Metrograph images
Once you have identified the different angles of this triangular character study, good one Sam walks quietly and slowly, enjoying the upstate New York landscape and observing the age-old rituals of old friends and family. She senses that these hikes form the foundation of Sam’s relationship with her father—he casually mentions a previous trip to Muir Woods, suggesting that they’ve been going on these long nature walks for a while—and that Chris and Matt have a history of pushing each other’s buttons. Sam is the odd teenager out as they chat about broken dreams and bitterness over bad decisions. Matt asks what she would do in another life, as a prompt for conversation. She calmly replies, “I guess I’m still choosing what I do in this one.”
It is no exaggeration to say that much of the grace and, ultimately, emotional resonance of good one The secret lies in Callias’s performance, and how she transforms a symphony of reaction shots into a portrait of a woman caught in the crossfire of middle-aged males. Callias, an actress barely out of her teens, is able to subtly shift her facial expressions in a way that hints at (and in some cases immediately conceals) seismic shifts beneath the surface. That’s not to say that Le Gros, a true indie actor who seems to be getting better with age, and McCarthy don’t deliver equally nuanced performances, or that Donaldson’s deft way of weaving deep, complex backstories into the minutiae of casual conversation doesn’t add significantly to the film. It’s simply that for a film full of men talking, joking, grumbling, and complaining, this extraordinary addition to the pantheon of lost innocence is really about what’s left unsaid—and that’s where Callias comes in. It’s truly one of the best unsaid performances in modern American cinema.
Okay, that “loss of innocence” thing: There’s a sense that something is looming, beyond the scenic landscapes and Mother Nature’s bounty, in the film’s slow pace and the small turns of people caught in a trough of self-pity. One sentence radically changes the tone of the trip and the film itself, and the audience is left to sift through the debris of what turns out to be betrayals—plural, not singular. And for something so “small,” the ripples left by that remark are enormous. The film has always been Sam’s from the start, but so much of Donaldson’s film is generously devoted to being a broody Brooklyn dad’s whore, as these two men wax poetic and wistful about second marriages, second families, and the lack of second chances. Then the allegiance shifts completely to Callias, and you feel like you, like her, see things really clearly. A little too clearly. good one Among its myriad attributes, this film is a tribute to a style of filmmaking that seems humble, but still manages to be devastating and fundamentally human. Mostly, it's just a great movie, period.
