One year after her involvement in a fatal car crash, Allison (Florence Pugh), finds herself slipping deeper and deeper into depression and addiction to prescription pain medication.  She makes her way to an AA meeting where Daniel (Morgan Freeman), her would-be father-in-law, is also in attendance.  The two begin to talk outside of the meetings and slowly begin to work together on the path of acceptance and forgiveness, but the feelings of guilt, blame, and resentment are not so easily quelled.   

Zach Braff writes and directs A Good Person for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.  The drama is supported by strong performances by the cast who all do a good job at balancing the tone against with punctuations of levity.  At 128 minutes, the film does run a little long in the tooth, especially as it races to forge its connections in the final half-hour or so, but the flow of the narrative makes for, and for lack of a better word, an enjoyable film.  If Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea (2016) is a cup of black coffee, A Good Person has a little bit of cream and sugar mixed in. 

Pugh continues to align herself with unique and interesting projects and the stripped-down A Good Person is no exception as it finds her Alison lounging in her sweatpants, chopping her own hair in the bathroom, and only leaving the house in search of a fix.  While Freeman is an equal force over the direction of the narrative, A Good Person is largely on Pugh’s shoulders to deliver, and as such she gets to interact with a wider variety of supporting cast members that make up the small New Jersey town.  This includes her old co-worker Becka (Ryann Redmond) from the insurance firm, and two high school classmates she meets at the bar, Mark (Alex Wolff) and Diego (Brian Rojas).  On one hand, Braff’s script is efficient in that these characters enter for their one scene, serve their purpose, and leave, but their inclusion scratches at the itch that many of the social problems which this film deals with are handled on only the most basic of levels.  Braff’s script is ripe with drama but afraid to tackle the stigma of drug addiction, or the feelings of being left behind given the economic disparity between smaller communities that never quite reached the status of an illustrious suburb so these ancillary characters, enjoyable as they are, amount to little more than bit parts in the overall narrative. 

Opposite of Pugh is Freeman’s Daniel, a Vietnam veteran, ten years sober and struggling to raise his granddaughter, Ryan (Celeste O’Connor), in the wake of Allison’s car accident in which Ryan’s parents were tragically killed.  Freeman, in this late stage of his career, works well as an affable grandpa who just cannot reconcile with today’s youth.  It is mostly good-natured banter back and forth about what the different colored text message bubbles mean, while also balancing conversations about the prevalence of sex in teenagers’ lives and that teaching protection is far more effective than preaching abstinence.  While Braff’s script does fall into some of the curmudgeon-y tropes, he thankfully crafts Daniel’s arc with a little more so it is not just an old man learning to love again.  As with Allison, the role is greatly enhanced by the performance, and even when Daniel grows irate at the situation he has been cast into, Freeman brings a warmth to the screen as a man at his wit’s end and just trying to do right by God. 

Much of the middle act of the film is about the growing understanding between Allison and Daniel.  Their chemistry drives the film and keeps us endeared to the narrative.  As the omnipotent observer, we know more about these characters than they do of each other, so the drama comes in two main forms.  First, is an explanation of various character traits; Allison’s watch or Nathan’s (Chinaza Uche) hearing for example.  This helps to broaden the characters and it shows Braff’s attention to detail in that many things that were set up seemingly innocuously have a larger purpose.  He gets a little carried away and some of these resolutions come off a little too cute and neat to really serve the story, but there is little if anything on the page or on the screen that was not left there intentionally.   

The second driving force of tension comes in the development of their relationship.  A Good Person follows the typical ebbs and flows of a drama requiring a setback late in the second act so that we can recover in the third.  It is not groundbreaking storytelling, but it is competent, and that accessibility helps keep us engaged more than if it was trying to circumvent this natural process.  Braff places his confidence in his cast and allows them to bring shades of nuance to the film through their performance rather than try and manufacture cheap tricks on the page.  Largely it works, and as the film continues, the central relationship begins to shift from Allision and Daniel to Allison and Ryan which is when things begin to get sticky. 

Daniel finds himself in a difficult situation of wanting Ryan to open up and find a role model, but he is uncomfortable that it is the woman he has blamed for the death of his daughter.  It is this relationship, also, where Braff seems his most unsure in how to handle the characters.  Ryan has the benefit of being a teenager so her motivations do not always need to track in a linear way, but her arc swings about wildly and in such a way that it seems to discredit her own critical thinking that poor O’Connor has to enter into each scene as an almost different person.  She handles the swinging nature of her role well enough, but once her character is established as the dramatic barometer of the film instead of Alison and Daniel, it is when Braff finds himself at his weakest in the role of the screenwriter because he is unsure how he wants to handle the character and is apprehensive about making any bold statements about the youth of today and the changing society we live in.  It feels a bit like a scared narrative that quickly falls back into the power of love and compassion which will cure all things, and while it is not necessarily a bad message, that the film takes that route really leaves us with a feeling that Braff may be unequipped to tell this exact story in the best way possible. 

For what it is, though A Good Person is a well thought out, old fashioned family drama that deals with the trials of modern life.  Thriving on the back of two incredible performances from Freeman and Pugh, the film finds a decent balance between the melodramatic and the comic.  There are points, especially in the later throes, where the charm wears a little thin, but it is forgiven as the cast is quick to recover in the setup for the next hurdle to cross.  The script flirts with being daring, but ultimately Braff plays a little too safe and conservative to really punish the characters in a lasting way outside of the initial setup.  Maybe they are due a bit of kindness after the trauma, sure, but to support the over-two-hours narrative, sometimes the sweetness of it all is a little too much to bear and we need a little sour to keep the stakes fresh. Outside of the inciting incident of the car crash, the actions and consequences hold little weight or influence over their relationships and we need that changing and volatile chemistry to really keep our interest; otherwise it is just following an unlikely trio bumping aimlessly into each other.