There’s a thin line between self-awareness and self-satisfaction, and writer-director Dan Levy’s debut feature, Good Grief, isn’t able to straddle it. While awareness is a sign of emotional maturity, being smug about it is perhaps the most immature thing that a person can do. So, when a character in Good Grief makes an off-handed comment about a fictional movie in an early scene, describing it as ‘cloying but well-intentioned’, you can’t help but wonder if that’s Levy with his guard up, pre-empting some of the criticism that could be lobbed in the direction of his film, which is out now on Netflix.
It’s a weepy about a 30-something who experiences a terrible loss, and then goes to Paris to process it. Levy stars as Marc, whose husband Oliver — a famed writer whose books are often turned into blockbuster films — dies tragically in a car accident in the film’s opening scene. After hard-cutting to a tragicomic title card, however, Good Grief jumps forward by a year, and dishes out some more bad news to a still-grieving Marc. It’s the kind of bad news that completely alters his perception of his late husband, and compels him to make an impromptu international trip.
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He invites his two best friends, the bohemian Sophie (played by Ruth Negga in a jaw-droppingly strange performance) and his once-lover Thomas (Himesh Patel, who seems to have been beamed in from an entirely different film altogether), to join him on the trip. Because both Sophie and Thomas are going through personal difficulties as well, they eagerly agree. But their commitment to getting Marc back on his feet is always the priority, and the movie makes this abundantly clear. Marc, however, is fully aware that his friends can’t keep invalidating their own crises to help him through his.
Daniel Levy (writer/director/producer) stars as Marc in Good Grief. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2023.
But as someone who willingly labels himself an ‘orphan and a widower’, it makes sense that Marc turns to his found family in his time of need. And it’s nice to see someone with a stable support system around them. But because of Levy’s determination to maintain a certain rosiness — the movie essentially takes place in two of the most affluent and gorgeous locations on the planet — as a viewer, you’re made to jump over an extra obstacle on your way to developing empathy for Marc and his buddies. The movie isn’t really interested in highlighting the cruel irony of being so miserable in pretty places. Nor does it seem interested in investigating how sadness can be a wholly different experience when you’re wealthy and privileged, because only Zoya Akhtar‘s detractors would assume that unhappiness is restricted to the unfortunate.
There’s a near-constant dissonance in the kind of primal emotions that Good Grief is looking to unpack and the devotion to genre aesthetics that it is entirely incapable of ignoring. Marc doesn’t, for instance, need to worry about income; he can afford to spend a year doing yoga and lingering at art exhibitions and being hit on by suave Frenchmen. All of this, mind you, happens before he jets off to Paris.
Daniel Levy (writer/director/producer) stars as Marc in Good Grief. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2023.
It doesn’t help that Marc speaks not like a human being, but entirely in aphorisms. “To avoid sadness is to avoid love,” he says in one scene. And in a scene before that, Levy the filmmaker deems fit to have a character physically get up from their seat, walk over to a gramophone, and play Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” before an emotionally charged interaction. It’s almost as if she couldn’t have proceeded without the ideal soundtrack. It would’ve been overly saccharine even if he’d restricted the song to being a background needle-drop, but to underline it in this fashion is perhaps emblematic of Good Grief as a whole, and of Levy’s cautious sensibilities as a filmmaker.
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Too good-natured to actively dislike but too slight to warrant a full-throated recommendation, Good Grief is only marginally more refined than the sort of schmaltz that Netflix releases on a weekly basis, especially at this time of the year. The acting is all over the place, the doe-eyed attitude is a bit overbearing, but the movie has its heart in the right place, and more exquisite clothes on display than you’d find on a Milanese runway. It’s the cinematic equivalent of an indifferent shrug.
Good Grief
Director – Dan Levy
Cast – Dan Levy, Himesh Patel, Ruth Negga, Luke Evans
Rating – 2/5
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