A Good Person (2023 | USA | 129 minutes | Zach Braff)

A Good Person, the newest movie from Zach Braff: director and writer, is melodrama through and through, for better or worse. It’s often manipulative, cloying, overly sentimental, and it leans heavily on cliche. It’s also saved by excellent performances by two leads. 

The plot goes like this: Alison (Florence Pugh) is a young woman with a bright future ahead of her. She’s pretty, respected, has tons of friends, is engaged to her soulmate Nathan (Chinaza Uche), and has a high-paying job working for Big Pharma that she can justify to her conscience without a ton of magical thinking. 

That is until one day she’s involved in an accident on an interstate that injures her and kills her would-be future sister and brother-in-law. She is quick to point out throughout the film that the accident couldn’t have been her fault because she wasn’t drunk or on drugs, but she was looking at her cellphone when she had a collision with a backhoe. 

A good life that seemed effortless is gone and Alison spends most of her time on her mother’s (Molly Shannon) couch and looking for her next hit of oxycontin. Doctors are no longer willing to write prescriptions for pills and an attempt to blackmail a friend into getting pills for her ends poorly. She can only get a fix by embarrassing herself to former classmates she looked down upon in high school.

When Alison drops by a support meeting, she runs into Daniel, Nathan’s father. He is played by the legendary Morgan Freeman and he begins to help her on her sobriety and recovery even though she has caused plenty of pain in his family. He’s now struggling to raise his rebellious granddaughter Ryan (Celeste O’Connor) on his own. 

I did find it surprising how little the film had to say about opioid addiction, basically that it’s bad. To Zach Braff’s defense, I probably now see any movie purporting to be about opioid addiction as inadequate because I’ve seen All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. 

For all of the predictability and melodrama in Braff’s script, it’s just the latest film in a series of movies that left me in unintelligible tears afterward, unable to give the expected feedback after the preview screening. I think what kept the movie from descending into a paint-by-numbers, made-for-TV tearjerker is the strong performances from Pugh, O’Connor, and Freeman. They are all terrific in their roles (Celeste O’Connor is a revelation). 

I found the movie a lot more affecting than I was prepared for. It’s not perfect (very far from it), but it’s a tearjerker than very much jerks tears (at least it was for me). You’ve been warned, or given notice, whichever you prefer.

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A Good Person opens in theaters on Friday, March 24.