Blu-ray Review: A Good Person

By John Corrado

★★½ (out of 4)

The latest film written and directed by Zach Braff (Garden State, Wish You Were Here), A Good Person is an addiction drama that follows Allison (Florence Pugh), a young woman who becomes hooked on painkillers following a car accident.

The film opens with Allison excited to marry her boyfriend Nathan (Chinaza Uche). But it all comes crashing down when she is driving her future in-laws to help pick out a wedding dress, and ends up crashing the car while checking a map on her phone.

Allison is the only one to survive the accident, with her passengers killed on impact. Cut to a year later, and Allison is left struggling with opioid addiction and living with her mother (Molly Shannon). Through AA meetings, she starts developing a friendship with Daniel (Morgan Freeman), the man whose daughter was killed in the accident, who is struggling to raise his orphaned granddaughter Ryan (Celeste O’Connor) on his own.

The film deals with a lot of heavy themes, and doesn’t always know how to fully grapple with all of them, which leads to a few awkward tonal shifts. At times this feels like the bland, studio dramedy take on the opioid crisis, with some story turns that come across as overly maudlin and melodramatic. But Pugh and Freeman are strong enough actors to mostly rise above the somewhat uneven material, delivering a pair of vulnerable performances that play well off each other. Braff allows for some more tender moments between these two characters, detailing how these broken people form a tentative bond despite their strained connection to each other.

While A Good Person mines similar territory as other addiction dramas such as Beautiful Boy, A Star is Born and Ben is Back with decidedly lesser results, there are still enough effective moments throughout Braff’s film to make it mildly worth a look. Despite some missteps along the way, the film is kept mostly involving to watch across its over two hour running time, and is at its best in the more emotionally raw, character-driven scenes, which are convincingly performed by Pugh and Freeman.

Bonus Features (Blu-ray):