ALL GOOD THINGS
Directed by Andrew Jarecki
Produced by Bruna Papandrea, Michael London, Marc Smerling & Jarecki
Written by Marcus Hinchey & Marc Smerling
Released by Magnolia Pictures
USA. 98 min. Rated R
With Ryan Gosling, Kirsten Dunst, Frank Langella, Lily Rabe, Philip Baker Hall, Michael Esper & Diane Venora
 

Capturing the Friedmans’ director Andrew Jarecki tries his hand at fiction with mixed results in All Good Things, a film based on the 1982 disappearance of the wife of troubled New York real-estate heir Robert Durst. Though her body has never been found, she was legally declared dead in 2001. Durst was suspected but never tried with a crime.

In some ways Jarecki returns to the territory he staked out in Capturing: a sensational true-life tale from the Northeast involving families, secrets, and unspeakable crimes. David Marks (Ryan Gosling), the ne’er-do-well older son of a powerful family, falls for Katherine (Kirsten Dunst), a sweet young girl from a working-class home on Long Island who’s a tenant in one of his dad’s buildings.

Like any young couple in love in the 1970s, they decide to move to Vermont to open a health food store (its name gives the film its title). But their romance comes up against pressure from David’s controlling father (an excellent Frank Langella), who wants them to move back to the city so David can work for the family firm (here called the Marks Organization, not the Durst Organization—all names are changed, likely for artistic as much as for legal reasons). But unlike his well-oiled younger brother, David won’t make deals behind a desk. He’ll have to pick up wads of cash from his father’s sleazy tenants in pre-Giuliani Times Square.

So the couple heads back to New York and David’s troubled soul emerges. He mutters angrily behind locked bathroom doors; he flips out when Katherine tries to enroll in medical school. Just in case you don’t realize something’s wrong and aren’t sufficiently alienated (and it takes Katherine a while), Jarecki makes him wear huge dorky glasses of the sort filmmakers usually put on pedophiles. Soon the tale twists through abortion, murders, cross-dressing, the perversion of justice, and other such things.

It makes for a competent enough thriller, but you get the sense Jarecki had hoped it would be something more, but the film’s structure forces him to simplify. He has to cover a period of some 30 years, and to do so, the script jumps around so much it obliterates any intelligible motivation as it hustles the characters from period set piece to period set piece. David drops one line about wanting to open a health food store on the first night he meets Katherine—and behold, seconds later we see them opening the store. Similarly, after a brief visit from David’s bullying dad, we’re whisked away from Vermont to Studio 54-era Manhattan.

The film also uses a lazy writer’s trick, where much of someone’s problems stem from a traumatic childhood event—in this case, David having witnessed his mother’s suicide as a young boy. But this isn’t to fault the performers, especially Gosling, who heroically manages several scenes in B-movie aging makeup, and Langella, who keeps his part from degrading into a cartoon.

Some of the script relies on actual court testimony, and the picture ends with those titles explaining the fates of characters, just as in a documentary. But this is essentially a fiction, with fake characters who have fake names and substantially faked histories. (Even so, Jarecki is cautious enough to suggest much more than he shows—again, probably for artistic as much as for legal reasons.) And while it’s fine to play with the facts to improve the story, here the omissions and alterations just serve to make it more ordinary, turning it into, as New York Magazine said, “an indie Sleeping with the Enemy.” Maybe it’s best to view this as a lost opportunity. As weird and ambiguous the story told by Jarecki is, it just can’t beat the real thing. Brendon Nafziger
December 4, 2010