A walk in the woods becomes a petri dish of human nature in “Good One,” writer-director India Donaldson’s taut, revealing and exquisitely composed debut about a 17-year-old on the cusp of adulthood. In its lifelike quality and escalating turmoil, “Good One” is an indie-film dream, from the craft in every frame to the humor, epiphanies and mysteries that frame its portrait.
Her watchful soul is a New York daughter of divorced parents, Sam (Lily Collias, a real find), who with her remarried architect father, Chris (James Le Gros), expects their upstate jaunt to be a backpacking foursome. But when the teenage son of her dad’s oldest friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy), backs out at the last second, making them a trio, Sam finds herself without a peer — a disillusionment Collias conveys perfectly without words from the backseat of the SUV. Over the course of an endurance-testing weekend, we get to know this Mona Lisa-esque visage all too well, as Sam’s microexpressions and expressions betray fascinating variations on “How did I get here?”
That’s because the trip quickly becomes the Matt and Chris show, a long-running two-character movie filled with bickering, personality tics and grievances that suggests a friendship of opposites well past its sell-by date. Sam’s kindly, condescending father, played masterfully by one of our most underappreciated actors (when will James Le Gros get his Oscar?), is an uptight, overly organized weekend warrior with little tolerance for his old friend’s chaotic quality and self-mythologizing prattle. Matt, for his part, is paternalistic and armchair philosophical, but in McCarthy’s perfectly captured performance of an ego barely held together by well-bitten fingernails, he can barely conceal how depressed he is by a life gone to waste, or how hurt he is by Chris’s blows.
James Le Gros, right, and Danny McCarthy in the film “Good One.”
(Images from Metrograph)
All of this leaves Sam in a position where he’s not only the lonely butt of the couple’s “These Kids Today”-style jokes, but also, by turns, personal assistant, cook, adviser, and peacemaker. (When Sam takes care of his period by crouching behind a tree, the feeling is that of an unwelcome workman’s break.) A quality getaway with loved ones starts to feel like managing a suffocating situation. Even his likability becomes a weapon: When he gets carried away by Matt’s harmless, random musings or laughs with him, you can feel his father’s irritation rising.
“Good One” is so adept at tracking a young woman’s emotional intelligence — as funny, precise and patient as a Kelly Reichardt film like “Certain Women” — that when the moment comes when everything changes, it’s a legitimate surprise. Don’t call it a twist, though (no spoilers here). It’s a built-in hinge, and Donaldson, who is averse to melodrama, treats it as such, allowing it to open the door to a final act of decision-making and discovery that positions Sam as a more self-possessed person coming out of this strange, enlightening journey.
Much of the artistry in this psychologically complex film is wonderfully assured, from cinematographer Wilson Cameron’s textured intimacy with nature and faces to the delicately applied, deceptively varied music. What gives me most hope for Donaldson as a filmmaker, though, is how much he cares about the lost magic of set-piece work, those building blocks of human interaction — movement, composition, dialogue, pacing, depth, and in this case the gifts of an incredible newcomer, Collias — that fuse us with a film’s internal logic, its intangibles. “Good One” is as complete a piece of storytelling as you’ll see all year. For a kettle of frogs about to boil, it’s a great place to be.
'Well'
Classification: R, for language
Duration: 1 hour, 29 minutes
Playing: Opens Friday at Landmark Theatres Sunset, Los Angeles
