A Good Person Parent Guide

Joyfully anticipating her upcoming wedding to Nathan (Chinaza Uche), Allison (Florence Pugh) drives off to try on wedding dresses. In the car with her are Nathan’s sister, Molly (Nichelle Hines) and her husband, Jesse (Toby Onwumere). In a split second, everything changes – an accident in a construction zone leaves Molly and Jesse dead and Allison drowning in a sea of grief and guilt.

A year later, Allison’s life is bleak. Engagement broken, she’s living with her mother (Molly Shannon) and struggling with addiction to Oxycontin. In a desperate search for help, she goes to an AA meeting, where she runs into Nathan’s father, Daniel (Morgan Freeman), who is battling his own demons and trying to raise his orphaned granddaughter, Ryan (Celeste O’Connor). Daniel reaches out to help Allison, but their shared tragedy continues to sow division and suffering.

I will admit up front that I don’t understand the appeal of movies about addiction (or cancer for that matter) but these topics continue to inspire filmmakers. A Good Person is a wrenchingly sad film, which is understandable since its subject matter is tragic. I’m just not sure who is going to want to watch it. I can’t imagine that recovering addicts or their family members want to revisit all the pain and suffering they finally left behind. I don’t think most filmgoers want to spend two hours immersed in misery and despair. The audience that would benefit from this film is teenagers who need to understand the true horrors of drug addiction - but this film has far too much negative content for an underage audience.

Boy oh boy, is the negative content here a doozy. Profanity is ubiquitous, with 95 sexual expletives and another four dozen swear words. Main characters are shown smoking, drinking to the point of intoxication, and using drugs – either swallowing illicit painkillers, snorting drugs, or smoking heroin. An underage character is also shown under the influence of an unspecified substance. Adults are seen in bed together (without nudity) and a teenage girl is twice discovered in bed with an adult man (again without explicit content). There’s even some violence in scenes where a man is punched in the face, grabbed by the neck, and threatened with a handgun. There are no free spots in this movie’s content bingo card.

Plaudits for this film go to the cast, who are almost universally good. (Molly Shannon struggles as Allison’s mother, but I think her role is poorly written.) Morgan Freeman is one of America’s greatest actors, and in this film you can watch him visibly age in a matter of seconds. He brings sincerity and gravitas to his complex, messy character and emotionally grounds the entire film. Florence Pugh once again demonstrates that she is one of her generation’s best as she delivers a fierce, vulnerable, gutsy performance as a broken woman who tries to heal.

There’s definitely a need for movies that explore the hard realities of being human, the tragedies that ravage people’s lives, and our desperate need for forgiveness, hope, and courage. Adult audiences at the multiplex need more to choose from than one spandex-suited superhero after another. But couldn’t we get grown-up stories with less profanity and on-screen drug use? Honestly, the stories would be just as powerful and I would be happy to recommend them. Thanks to the negative content, I can’t recommend A Good Person. But I wish I could.