A Good Person review: Zach Braff directs Florence Pugh in a scattershot melodrama

Braff’s film, which arrives 18 years after his seminal ‘Garden State’, has a tendency to approach moral complexity as a checklist

Interested in what A Good Person might suggest about Florence Pugh’s past relationship with its writer and director Zach Braff? You won’t find many bones to gnaw on here. Their personal lives – they were a couple between 2019 and 2022 – are relevant only to the extent that Braff wrote his script with Pugh in mind. And as someone who knows what she’s capable of, he happily lets the film act as her own personal awards reel. You could count on one hand the number of scenes where the actor, playing an opioid addict enmeshed in guilt, isn’t screaming or crying.

A Good Person is also fuelled by Braff’s own emotions – he wrote its script after a period of profound grief, in which he lost his father, sister, and best friend in a short span of time. Yet as unimpeachable as his motivations may be, and as unvarnished as his work may feel, there’s something inescapably scattershot about the finished product. Imagine it as a jar full of thoughts and feelings, but one that’s been tipped over and spilt haphazardly onto the floor. Pugh is excellent, as she always is, ruled by instinct and laced with pain down to her very arteries – but it’s only because she’s so believable that she’s allowed to clamber on top of the mess.

She plays Allison, a woman whose soft indie-soundtracked bliss is interrupted by a deadly car crash. In its wake, she’s barely able to process what’s happened and becomes addicted to the opioids prescribed by her doctor and then abruptly taken away. Braff probes gently at a few hypocrisies. Allison works in the pharmaceutical industry and, even if the drugs she peddles aren’t addictive, she’s still complicit in a system that privileges profit over people’s lives. Her mother, too, is clearly addicted to alcohol. But Diane, played by Molly Shannon, is spontaneous and fun when drunk, so it’s easier for her to brush it under the carpet.

This is all fine, yet A Good Person has a tendency to approach moral complexity as a checklist. Diane, at one point, quite literally tells Allison to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. Unequipped parent, tick! Allison, during a relapse, confronts her reflection in a mirror. Skewed self-perception, tick! She turns up at a dive bar to score some harder drugs from an old schoolmate (Alex Wolff). The spiral is complete, tick!

The film’s weakest throughline involves a volatile friendship with her fiancé’s father, Daniel, played by Morgan Freeman. His performance here seems to oscillate wildly between that of the twinkly-eyed, cantankerous senior attempting to raise his 18-year-old granddaughter (Celeste O’Connor) and that of a man who casually confesses to a violent past, with little connective tissue between the two. Without that necessary sense of grounding, Braff’s film collapses into melodrama – all screaming matches and hazily shot drug sequences. When someone randomly pulls out a gun, it doesn’t even come as a shock. A Good Person lost control of itself long before that.

Dir: Zach Braff. Starring: Florence Pugh, Morgan Freeman, Molly Shannon, Chinaza Uche, Celeste O’Connor, Zoe Lister-Jones. 15, 129 minutes.

‘A Good Person’ is in cinemas from 24 March, and is available on Sky Cinema from 28 April