NATHAN WEINBENDER:
If you weren’t paying attention, you’d think that nothing much happens in India Donaldson’s quietly arresting debut feature Good One. It’s about three characters who go off into the woods together, one of whom emerges with a more clear-eyed understanding of the adult world, and of men in particular. This is ultimately a movie about trust, about betrayal, about how things that are spoken softly—or not spoken at all—can have the loudest echoes.
The film begins as 17-year-old Sam (Lilly Collias) and her dad, Chris (James Le Gros), are getting ready for their three-day excursion into the forests of the Catskills. It’s perhaps the last such trip before Sam goes off to college. They’ve clearly done this many times before, because their preparation has the choreography of ritual.
Joining them is Chris’s friend, a struggling actor named Matt (Danny McCarthy). His teenage son was supposed to come along, but the two of them got into a fight, and now Matt is flying solo. Unlike Sam and Chris, Matt has no idea what’s in store: he overstuffs his pack, he wears the wrong clothes, he forgets his sleeping bag in the car.
They go deeper into the woods. There’s a lot of conversation: idle chatter, small talk, drunken philosophical musings. Both men have gone through divorces, Matt only recently, and the camera hangs on Sam’s face as they talk about the women in their lives—cavalierly, thoughtlessly, a bit crassly. It’s as if they’ve forgotten Sam is even there. She needles them back: do they not realize that they’re just as complicit for the sorry states of their personal lives? They concede that she has a point, and that she sure is perceptive for her age.
As a writer, Donaldson has an ear for the effortless patter of people really talking. As a director, she keeps us on edge, though we’re not always sure why. Perhaps it’s because we’re inherently cautious about two 50-something men in isolation with a teenage girl, or because nothing good tends to happen to movie characters in the woods. A lesser film would have manufactured a conflict, or, even worse, some kind of peril. But Good One builds instead to a fleeting moment between Sam and her father’s friend, and then another between Sam and her father, and the way these moments settle, one atop the other, makes you realize what the movie has been up to all along.
It’s about the ways in which older generations look at younger ones, and the ways in which men look at girls, and it’s more specifically about a girl on the cusp of adulthood realizing that she can’t really escape those things, even in the middle of nowhere.
But the movie is careful not to define Sam strictly through the lens of these two men. As Sam, Lilly Collias, a relative acting newcomer, is so magnetic and so believable, a wave of complex emotions always washing over her face. And Danny McCarthy, a character actor you may recognize, doesn’t play Matt like the one-note buffoon we expect, and his complexity makes everything that happens so much more heartbreaking.
As is typical of the film’s style, it ends on a grace note that also functions as a whopper of a punchline, and it leaves us certain that Donaldson is a fresh filmmaking voice to watch out for.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a film critic for Spokane Public Radio, and one of the regular co-hosts on Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM here on KPBX.
