Geekscape Reviews ‘All Good Things!’
God, titles like All Good Things are frustrating. Why oh why do movies insist on putting qualitative statements in their titles? Don’t they know that critics have to write about these things? In the case of All Good Things I’m also wondering if anyone saw the finished cut of the film and suggested renaming it, since nobody is likely to say many good things at all about this thing. Outside of some good performances, there’s nothing much to recommend it. You’ll spend most of All Good Things reassuring yourself that it will end soon, because indeed, All Good Things must. Right? Right?
Ryan Gosling plays David Marks, the son of a rich real estate magnate played by Frank Langella. David hates his father for his obsession with his work and his role in his mother’s suicide, but after meeting Katie (Kirsten Dunst), who lives in one of the family’s buildings, things start to turn around. They quickly fall in love, get married, and move far away from the city to start their own health food store. Things take a turn for the worse (“all good things,” blah blah) when David’s father convinces him to take a job in the family business to help care for the wife he claims to love so much. And so begins a downward spiral, in which David becomes depressed, introverted, and even abusive towards the woman he thinks he loves. Finally, Katie Marks just plain disappears. That was 30 years ago, and to this day she’s never been found. Many suspect that David Marks killed his wife, but there’s no proof one way or the other.
All Good Things features a stellar performance from Ryan Gosling (no surprise there) and a very good performance from Kirsten Dunst (which is worth remarking upon), but the movie that surrounds them is something of a mess. The film is based on a real-life mystery that has never been solved, but director Andrew Jarecki (making his first narrative feature after his critically-acclaimed documentary Capturing the Friedmans) and screenwriters Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling don’t have the chutzpah to fill in the blanks for us. There are a lot of events the film just doesn’t show, and since that mystery doesn’t seem the be the point – unlike David Fincher’s Zodiac, for example – we’re left with 2/3’s of a film. And you’re really going to miss that 33.33334% by the time the credits roll and you’re sitting in the theater with only one question on your mind: “That’s it?”
What is the point, exactly? It’s hard to tell. Certainly this is an intriguing sequence of events, but All Good Things never ties them together well enough to tell a single, cohesive story. It’s not much of a murder mystery, since we still don’t know for certain if Katie Marks was even murdered (although the movie sure seems to think so; not that it’s willing to commit to that), nor is it much of a character piece since apparently nobody has ever known David Marks well enough to actually get inside his head. We’re left, fittingly enough for a film by a documentarian, with a movie that portrays what we do know, and from a distance. It’s left to the very capable cast to make us empathize with the characters (and Gosling in particular is, once again, absolutely phenomenal), but they’re working at odds with a very objective storytelling style that does them a disservice. Maybe this approach would have been more successful with a complete story to tell, but certainly not the bits and pieces they’ve culled together for us here.
All Good Things has bad things in it, but it’s not inept and it’s not awful. It just does its business, and yet you’ll get the distinct impression that it’s in the wrong line of work. With its fascinating “Based On A True Story”-edness and lingering mysteries, All Good Things would have been one hell of an article in Time Magazine. It’s just not a particularly good movie.
