THE GOOD GUY
Written & Directed by Julio DePietro
Produced by Linda Moran, Rene Bastian & Julio DePietro
Released by Roadside Attractions
USA. 90 min. Not Rated
With Alexis Bledel, Scott Porter, Bryan Greenberg, Anna Chlumsky, Aaron Yoo & Andrew McCarthy
 

The Good Guy is a straight-faced description of Daniel (Bryan Greenberg), the newest trader at a cash-obsessed Wall Street investment company. What makes Daniel “good” is that, unlike his male peers, he’d rather be reading Pride and Prejudice and spooning a sexually infantile woman than out banging bimbos and slamming shots of Patrón Anejo.

It’s something of an accident then that Daniel wound up on Wall Street. He went to Princeton and enlisted in the military to pay for his education. (Never mind that these days Princeton students of limited means get their tuition bills comped by the financial aid office.) But
Daniel was discharged early for some murky infraction and saddled with a debt of $100,000. To pay it off, he sells his soul to the highest bidder and ends up in the Financial District. “All those push-ups for nothing,” he tells his love interest, Beth (played by the cloying Alexis Bledel). “I wouldn’t say nothing,” she retorts, glancing at Daniel’s hardened build. What keeps the chirping lovebirds apart (at least for a time) is Beth’s commitment to Tommy, Daniel’s hotshot supervisor and—in the film’s quirkiest conceit—our less-than-reliable narrator.

In this movie, and also in his new HBO series How To Make It in America, Greenberg conveys a kind of cautious sincerity that’s sometimes compelling. The problem is he doesn’t convey much of anything else, nor does Bledel. This is compounded by the botched efforts of first-time writer and director Julio DePietro, whose script of fast-living Manhattan singles—conceived before the economic downturn —is dead on arrival. Invest your dollars elsewhere. Stephen Heyman
February 19, 2010