Capturing the Friedmans documentarian Andrew Jarecki segues into reality-based fiction with All Good Things, the based-on-real-events tale of a NYC real-estate tycoon heir’s rebellion against his father, his marriage, and then the apparent cover-up of the murder of his wife. Filling in back-story with staged home movies that creepily echo Friedmans’ footage, Jarecki’s fascination with dysfunctional family dynamics and the difficulty of ascertaining truth about thoughts and deeds continues via the saga of David Marks (Ryan Gosling), who – still suffering from seeing his beloved mother commit suicide when he was a boy – refuses to join father Sanford’s (Frank Langella) family biz, instead choosing in the early ‘70s to date, and then tie the knot with, Katie McCarthy (Kirsten Dunst). Theirs is a blissful union initially spent smoking pot and running a Vermont health food store (“All Good Things”), a reverie that soon crumbles under the weight of parental pressures, mental illness, Katie’s desire to go to med school, and a pregnancy that’s unwanted by one of the two expectant parents. Just after its midway point, All Good Things dips into true-crime territory, with Katie – desperate for a divorce – disappearing and David fleeing, in 2000, for Texas, where he takes up cross-dressing and forms a friendship with an elderly man (Philip Baker Hall) whom [spoiler alert] he kills in supposed self-defense. It’s a tawdry tale of wealth, expectations, resentment and psychosis that Jarecki frames with distracting witness-stand testimony from David, and chops up through crosscutting and abrupt edits. These stylistic choices, which often resemble documentary techniques, clearly reflect the unknown aspects of the actual events portrayed. Yet as with David – who, despite a committed performance by Gosling and a standard psychological portrait tendered by Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling’s script, proves to be a man whose deranged impulses and motives remain a mystery – the overall effect of these aesthetic devices is to leave the action mired in a hazy remove, with the film proffering merely tantalizing speculation from afar rather than up-close-and-personal character and thematic insights.
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