Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Tue Nov 30, 2010 12:24 pm 
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RYAN GOSLING AND KIRSTEN DUNST IN ALL GOOD THINGS

A dubious drama of doubts and mysteries

Poor David Marks is a peculiar young man -- a fact perhaps immediately discernible since he is played by Ryan Gosling. He also dresses badly, and, at the height of the disco era, wears his hair close-cropped, combed back, and tightly parted, like someone in 1910. This is a film that makes a studied effort to be true to its period but keeps getting it wrong. David is one of the unfortunate rich. He is the son of a lord and sovereign of New York real estate, owner of a hefty chunk of Times Square, a tall, heavy man with the deceptively WASPy name of Sanford -- and clearly one to reckon with, because played by Frank Langella. Like Barbet Schroeder's Reversal of Fortune, this is a story of wealth, dysfunction and possible murder. But Barbet Schroeder is and was a pro. This is Andrew (Capturing the Friedmans) Jarecki's maiden voyage away from documentary filmmaking, and it's an uneven effort.

David, as the script keeps saying, was traumatized beyond redemption at the age of seven by being forced to watch his mother throw herself off the roof and plunge to her death. Her skull was....well, never mind. It seems Sanford, his father, allowed little David to watch, and later to approach his mother's dead body. We can guess David has resentments, aside from which, he's a very screwed up young man. He doen'st want to work for his father. But his father is powerful, while he is weak. When the movie begins, the stingy Sanford has sent David personally to stop on his way to a family party to do plumber's duty and fix a leaky kitchen pipe in an apartment. At this onerous chore, he fails. But there's a plus: he falls instantly in love with the young woman who's just moved there, Katie McCarthy (Kirsten Dunst). He takes her to the party. "Don't you realize she will never be one of us?" his father asks, speaking of David's beloved, whom an old girlfriend, Deborah Lehrman (Lily Rabe) has described as "a blonde shiksa." What does he mean, that she'll never be rich? Jewish? Anyway, he replies, "Isn't that great?" Before long they're married. At the family luncheon afterward Sanford, still stingy, makes Katie's mother pay half the bill, $39.50, which includes "a generous tip."

Things go downhill from there. Briefly David and Katie follow his dream and run a health food store in Vermont called "All Good Things." But that doesn't last long. Sanford wants David back in the family business in Manhattan, and David complies, offering Katie two grand residences, a high-ceilinged loft with a wall of windows in the city and a lakeside residence on Long Island, as compensation for giving up their dreams. It doesn't work. His job is collecting cash payments from sleazy businesses in Times Square.

Katie is like a prisoner. Though she has family and friends, she's denied the right to have a child. She begins to live at the Long Island house to avoid the opaque, imploded, inert David (except on weekends, when he shows up) and she goes to a community college. Later she gets into medical school. He doesn't like it. He clings to her compulsively, needily, and won't allow her to have her own life. She takes to cocaine. There are signs of beating. There has been an abortion. David behaves strangely. He talks to himself, smokes dope a lot, and swims in the lake in his jockey shorts, which, perhaps, for someone whose family is worth hundreds of millions, is insane. Mostly he just acts like Ryan Gosling with not much of a script to work with, relying on a lot of repressed Method intensity.

Some years later Katie -- Kirsten Dunst the long-suffering Good Sport here --begins seriously looking into divorce. She's wearing big Jackie O sunglasses to hide facial bruises. But she learns that David receives money only through family trusts and has none of his own, so if she divorces him, he can give her nothing. And he desperately wants her: what's a jailer without his prisoner? One day, she disappears. David may be suspected, but there is nothing against him. Some years later, though, a Long Island attorney revives the case. To avoid publicity David flees to Galveston, Texas.

There, things become less Barbet Schroeder and more David Lynch, or even Harmony Korine (as in Trash Humpers). In his new, disguised, and quite totally deranged life, David becomes friends with a neighbor who's more or less a penniless drifter, one Malvern Bump (the estimable and jarringly real Philip Baker Hall, who seems from another movie).

In 2003 when I wrote a review of Capturing the Friedmans, Andrew Jarecki's much-discussed documentary of a family's alleged involvement in child abuse, I expressed many reservations. This time he has used the very different methods of a feature film to investigate another true story about a family and events over several decades involving possible crimes that were never verified, and some convictions. This time, my reservations are different. Jarecki has put on the mask of fiction. His failure is not in misleading insinuations or sensationalism, but in thinking an unresolved criminal case will intrigue us when it revolves around an increasingly uninteresting central character who is never anything but an unpleasant and inexplicable cipher.

The excitement viewers felt, for good or ill, in watching Capturing the Friedmans was that it chronicled investigations by police and Jarecki himself, and though things remained unresolved, viewers got a lot of information to puzzle over and debate. The interest was in focusing as vicarious investigators on the hunt for clues. David Fincher does the same thing in a fiction feature, to better effect, by focusing with compulsively watchable obsessiveness on the fruitless but intriguingly complex investigations of the Zodiac killings. Zodiac, ultimately plodding, but brilliant in its detail and celebrated by critics, captures the true intricacy of an epic police procedural. Before making All Good Things Jarecki also conducted his own personal investigation of the case of Robert Durst-- the original of David Marks. But his feature itself never jells. The events in the concluding segment are nutty and unrelated. Threading the whole thing together with transcripts in which Marks (AKA Durst) describes his life, with shots of Gosling grayed over to look 25 years older, is a crude and old-fashioned device that doesn't make the movie unified or involving.

All Good Things begins well, as a drama of mood. Gosling is initially arresting. Langella is powerful, as always. Durst is a solid actress. But Jarecki and his collaborators in the writing, Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling, get bogged down in the details of the real story. They haven't produced a script that functions on its own. Besides that, specific details are handled badly. Some transitions are abrupt. A great effort has been made to recreate the sleaziest streets of Seventies Times Square, but the Marks family's wealthy lifestyle is surprisingly sketchy. Like the recent documentary Catfish, which Jarecki produced, a Facebook false identity story wrongly promoted as a thriller, All Good Things, an indigestible conglomeration of fact and fiction, is being marketed falsely. The trailers condense all the best lines to make it seem like a Godfather-esque epic full of brooding moodiness (acquired partly from Rob Simonsen's obtrusive, melodramatic music), and the poster intones, "The perfect love story. Until it became the perfect crime." It is neither. We don't know if a crime was committed. The love story is anything but perfect. But this fits in with Jarecki's penchant for treating mysteries as if they were revelations. He's still doing that.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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