Some are ruined by being born into the wrong family. And some by marrying the wrong person. It’s not obvious, except in the fact that the story flashes back from a courtroom scene, that things will go wrong for David Marks (Ryan Gosling), the personable young son of a wealthy New York real estate speculator (Frank Langella). Nor for his future wife Katie (Kirsten Dunst), a sweet girl he meets in 1971. With her, he moves to Vermont, where they run a health-food store called All Good Things. Seemingly metaphorical, this was in fact the real name of the store operated by the husband and wife who inspired this movie, directed by Andrew Jarecki from a script by Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling.
Jarecki is best known for another family saga, the Capturing the Friedmans. That was a documentary whose intrigue came in part because the truth about this strange family was somewhat elusive. The reason this heavily researched drama is not a documentary becomes clear eventually; although Jarecki is subtle about depicting some of the darker elements of the story, he obviously has assumed (or very strongly implied) facts that in real life must have been uncertain. Where the film remains ambiguous is in why David’s life goes sour, or at least why it happens when it does. Jarecki succeeds in depicting the progress of his disintegration, and Katie’s different sort of decline. Gosling is typically fine, Dunst heart-rending in her later scenes, and Langella suitably imposing. And obviously, that David witnesses his mother’s death as a child, that he is emotionally repressed, and that his father was an overbearing presence are part of what leads him astray. Yet what is apparent, especially the hold the family real estate business has on him, is not always palpable. In the end, this is a character who remains as elusive as he must have seemed to the Texas jury he testified before in 2003.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 1/13/11
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