“Goodrich” feels more like a therapy session than a movie

People often apologize to Andy Goodrich, the gallery owner played by Michael Keaton Goodrichwhich is strange considering the film’s premise is based on what an idiot he is. Andy knows so little about what’s going on at home that when his wife calls him in the middle of the night to tell him she’s checked herself into rehab, he’s equally shocked to discover that she hasn’t sleeps next to him in bed. He is supposed to find out that she is struggling with an addiction to pills. As a father, Andy was a wonderfully absent father to two generations of children. He now maintains a friendly relationship with his older daughter from his first marriage, Grace (Mila Kunis), but approaches his promotion to primary carer of the precocious 9-year-old twins from his second marriage with the ignorance of someone who is so distant that he The couple forgets that they have a nut allergy. Andy lives for the boutique art gallery that bears his name, even though it too is failing, burdened with loans and unable to pay rent, and whose artists are fleeing after exhibitions that fail to get even a single one to move the work. When his assistant quits to take an undeniably better job, the 20-year-old still says “sorry,” as if he had an obligation to his boss to go down with the ship.

According to writer-director Hallie Meyers-Shyer, Andy is inspired by her complicated feelings toward her father, fellow filmmaker Charles Shyer, who remarried after divorcing her mother, Nancy Meyers, and had two children with his third wife. Not all films benefit from a biographical reading, but this insight offers real insight Goodrichwhat feels like the focus of therapy. Goodrich wants to portray its eponymous hero as endearingly flawed, one of those charismatic natural forces whose presence makes the world a better place, even if it comes at the expense of those closest to them. But basically, despite all of his attempts to make peace with him as he is, it’s incredibly angry at its main character. At the end of the film, when Grace denounces her father after he forgets that he promised to take her to a doctor’s appointment, it’s a moment of honesty about the anger she felt watching him behave for her much younger half. Siblings, considering how little he was around when she was a child. Then, of course, she apologizes – not for what she said, but for saying it to him, as if she were breaking an unspoken pact that everyone had agreed to before the film began.

All of these “excuses” feel like a symptom Goodrichis a desire to keep things light and present itself as a comedic story about a man’s late midlife crisis rather than a story about the resentment of the women around him. The child of two successful Hollywood directors, Meyers-Shyer has now made two features that attempt to follow in those footsteps, but come from a truly foreign place. There’s a glossy, uncompromisingly ambitious quality to the work that Meyers in particular is famous for, and that Meyers-Shyer seems to emulate in both this film and her 2017 directorial debut. Back homethat her mother produced. But Meyers-Shyer doesn’t pause long to appreciate the splendor of the meticulously decorated house where Andy lives, or the art that is his all-consuming passion but which the camera barely allows time to capture, or even the dinners , which he takes part in. He constantly leaves his children behind to take part. Watch out Goodrich It’s not like you’re playing a tourist in an upscale world – it’s more like slipping into the head of someone whose sense of normality is completely different from your own. At one point, Grace describes her father’s life as unconventional, a confusing statement considering the film makes him seem like your average wealthy workaholic.

Goodrich needs its protagonist to charm, and Keaton can definitely charm. In one of his finest moments, he drives to his wife’s treatment center early on, even though she specifically wants him to stay away, his face blissful and amusingly unconcerned as piano music plays in the background. But Andy is simply not a compelling character – not in a way that would explain why so many people in his life feel the need to pander to his weaknesses and continually accept him for who he is, rather than wanting him to be himself changed. He’s less a lovable relic than someone who has seemed to exist for decades in a bubble that extends far beyond his own self-centeredness. For someone who ostensibly grew up in the art world, Andy is inexplicably confused by the idea of ​​rehab, by the gay father (Michael Urie) he befriends at the twins’ school, and by the woo-woo tendencies of the He approaches the singer (Carmen Ejogo) in the hope of being able to manage the estate of her mother, an artist. By the time the film attempts to inject some pathos in Andy’s direction, suggesting that he is beginning to realize the inherent loneliness of his decisions, the character has fallen apart. Goodrich ends where it feels like it should have begun, with Grace telling him how she really feels – which is a start but doesn’t exactly provide the same level of catharsis for the audience. Maybe in the next meeting!