“Do you have it in you to make it epic?” asks Dementus in Furiosa.
If Metrograph Pictures posed that question to India Donaldson, she must have shrugged and said, “Nope.”
Donaldson’s directorial debut Good One has a premise that’s so simple, it’s hard to imagine, just reading it, that it will become such a compelling, funny, unnerving, and ultimately meaningful film.
The opening scenes efficiently set the stage: Sam (Lilly Collias) is going with her father Chris (James LeGros) on a camping trip for several days in the lush, green forests of the Catskills. Chris is methodical and fiercely opinionated about how to prepare, how to pack, how to hike, how to set up camp.
But when they stop to pick up his buddy Matt (Danny McCarthy), whose recent divorce has left him moody (to say the least), it’s clear that this trip will be anything but easy. Where Chris wants to pack only what is absolutely necessary, Matt treats camping as a shop-and-haul challenge: How much can he bring with him from home? Can he bring a convenience store’s worth of snacks along with him?
For all of the things Matt decides to bring with him, the most significant detail of his departure is what he leaves behind—or, rather, who. Matt’s son Dylan had been part of the plan all along. His last-minute change of mind clearly has something to do with a falling out he’s had with his despondent dad. Apparently, Matt’s divorce is still doing damage in real time.
There’s a pinch of Planes, Trains and Automobiles in Chris and Matt’s back and forth banter—Chris as the uptight Steve Martin type, and Matt as the brash and obnoxious John Candy. But Donaldson’s casual realism is completely convincing, and where that John Hughes comedy zigzagged our sympathies between the tightass and the man-child, here we quickly settle into empathizing with poor Sam as she suffers the eye-rolling contest of egos between her father and the ride-along.
When we get to the hiking and camping, most moviegoers will start shuffling through their desk of movie cards to see which direction this film is going to turn. Are the strangers they meet in the woods going to be trouble? Do Chris and Matt have plans they haven’t told Sam about? Is disaster going to strike and leaving them fighting for their lives against the elements?
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