Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jason Adams | Film | January 7, 2024
Schitt’s Creek was, underneath its wall of wigs and crow costumes, a show about loss. Not just financial, as the Rose family at the show’s center didn’t just lose their cash money and mansions when we first met them—across its six seasons and eighty episodes co-creators Eugene Levy and his son Dan detailed how Johnny, Moira, David and Alexis had lost their family. And so we became emotionally invested watching them find that again—or really for the first time, so blinded by their wealth had they been before their fall. The Roses were able to discover who they actually were and what they meant to one another only through the traumatic process of rebirth.
And so the harmless if aimless dramedy Good Grief, Dan Levy’s feature directorial debut about death and friendship that’s hitting Netflix this weekend, isn’t really as unique a swing from him as it might seem at first glance. Stripped of Schitt’s big satirical swings (save a few wonky moments that might feel out of place here but which I found welcome anyway since they cut through Grief’s navel-gazing gloom), Levy is with this one aiming for seriousness. And well, if not exactly realism, a movie form of it. This is to say that Good Grief is about human beings, not caricatures (however delicious those caricatures were). But he’s still mulling familiar territory—so we might not have Catherine O’Hara selling fruit wines, but we do have a drunken Ruth Negga wearing a voluminous coat and playing maracas, and that’s not nothing!
Levy, beyond scripting and directing duties, also stars as Marc, a former painter married to an extremely rich and handsome and rich (I say rich) Y.A. author named Oliver (Luke Evans). They live together in a Notting Hill manse that would make Nancy Myers turn to swift ash—basically, it’s hard to tell where the Restoration Hardware display space ends and their living quarters begin. But this sort of boring lifestyle pornography is par for the course in a movie that, for all its straining for profundity, really wants to be called “cozy” and to be watched over a warm mug of something or other. (Double-fisted, of course.)
The film opens on Marc and Oliver’s great big annual Christmas Eve party, all warm golden glows and group sing-a-longs (that’s where Ruth and her maracas come in). Everybody is gorgeous and witty and Ikea-commercial multicultural, a rainbow of folks all perfectly appointed in luxurious fabrics that hopefully somebody got to take home at the end of the shoot.
But the fabulousness of this year’s celebration gets cut sh** short by a pair of unfortunate Noel undoings. First, Oliver has to dash off early to fly to Paris, where he’s doing a Christmas morning book-signing at the Louvre. Because, of course, he is. And second, Oliver has to die in an off-screen car crash just half a block down the street from said hearth and homestead. Because, of course, he does. Something has to happen.
But not as many somethings as you might expect—Good Grief, in the way of many a first film, is terribly over-written, with Levy forcing his characters to constantly talk about things instead of what’s come to be known as the cinematic choice of actually doing them.
There is a whisper of plot that does actually unravel from the point of Oliver’s death. A year into his grieving, Marc finds out that Oliver was cheating on him and that he had a pied-à-terre (and hot dancer lover) stashed away in Paris. And so Marc decides to drag his two best friends—that would be Negga as Sophie, a self-described “hot mess” who is “a lot,” and Himesh Patel as Thomas, Marc’s ex who, besides still being in love with Marc, also loves short-pants and long scarves—to scope it out.
Oh, and there’s also the matter of the world’s most patient Frenchman named Theo (Arnaud Valois), who we see Marc on a rare night out meet and immediately barf all of his problems onto in what no sane person could describe as a “meet-cute.” Any sane person would call it a “meet and run, run for your life, Theo!” But in Good Grief, Theo has no life or personality beyond being open to listening endlessly to a total stranger’s problems while also being hot and having a French accent. And he does those things marvelously. (He is played by Arnaud Valois, after all.)
But Marc doesn’t tell his best friends any of the real reasons for their trip—in the grand tradition of this sort of thing, he instead makes them think it’s to say thanks for their having put up with his bedridden year of magical thinking and to help them deal with their own ongoing sh**. And of course these little white lies of Marc’s come marching back in to jazz up the plot just when we’d all but forgotten there was one.
What Good Grief has instead of much plot then is a series of excuses Levy wrangles up to allow his characters the opportunity to make speech after speech containing perfectly nice and agreeable, if oft maudlin, ideas about grief. You know that already immortal line from WandaVision about how grief is love persevering? Well, I don’t think Levy does because he spends Good Grief’s full hundred minutes trying to come up with something that lovely and precise, and if he’d known somebody had written that already, he might’ve stopped straining so hard.
Obviously, a movie doesn’t need a plot to function—many of the best ones have very little. And there are things to cherish here when Levy manages to get out of his own way and let the movie relax its insistent speechifying a little. And most of that is thanks to his generosity with actors—he’s got a keen sense of the people he’s cast and a great strength at playing to theirs. British character actor David Bradley (best known as Mr. Filch in the Harry Potter movies) is given a few lovely moments as Oliver’s mournful father; similarly, Celia Imrie (playing Marc and Oliver’s lawyer) manages to overcome how sick we are of those speeches by the time hers comes around very late in the film.
And for their part Negga and Patel pretty much walk away with the film. Or they would if Levy didn’t insist on cutting back to Marc’s nonsense anyway. Honestly, it’s hard not to leave Good Grief wishing it’d fully been The Sophie and Thomas Show—not just because they’re stronger dramatic actors than Levy (although they certainly are), but because their characters are allowed to be charismatic messes whose problems play lightly at the margins instead of getting drummed into our heads through endless sentimental monologues. This both underlines Levy’s strengths—he did, after all, make this movie and give these great actors the space to be great—alongside his weaknesses. Which are, to say, “not nearly enough space.”
