There is a scene at the beginning of Robert Schwartzman The good half it encapsulates why the film, despite its good intentions, struggles to work. Wren (Nick Jonas), a 28-year-old writer living in Los Angeles, has returned to Cleveland for his mother’s funeral. He is standing in the kitchen of his father’s home (his parents are divorced) when his father Darren (Matt Walsh) stumbles upon him looking for a drink. They pour themselves some tequila and get down to the uncomfortable business of confronting their emotions.
Darren is the type of dad who runs to the internet for answers. He’s scoured the web for advice on how to comfort loved ones after a loss, and repeats the common lessons verbatim. “I feel like I’m letting you down,” Darren says when he realizes that clichés aren’t helping his son. “I feel I must quote Thoreau.”
The good half
The bottom row
Struggling to connect.
“The man from the forest?” Ren says confused.
Now, we don’t know much about Wren or his relationship with Darren at this point in the film. But we do know that the young man had a passion for writing, that he won short story prizes at school (as evidenced by various ephemera in his nursery), and that his mother urged him to never give up on his creative ambitions. Writing is clearly of great importance to Wren, although what he does is only vaguely indicated. So it’s hard to imagine that he would have called Thoreau a “man of the woods,” a descriptor that at best suggests a puzzling lack of recognition.
This problem is not unique to Renn. Many of the characters in The good half act in ways that don’t always make sense. Part of this is by design: the film, written by Brett Ryland, is about grief and all its idiosyncrasies, how the experience distorts everyday life, dividing one’s existence into two parts – the years before the loss and the years after. Predictably, these people, shaken by the death of their matriarch (an underused Elizabeth Shue in flashbacks), aren’t always legible. But it’s harder to excuse how shallow they feel, which creates friction in the film and makes it harder to buy into its sentimentality.
The good half begins with Wren on a flight to Cleveland, where he meets Zoe (Alexandra Shipp), a therapist on her way to a professional conference in the area. She’s afraid of flying, so she drags out their conversations with pointed questions and clever comments to distract her. The predictable trajectory of their relationship – Ren later finds in Zoe a reliable confidante – would have been easier to bear if either felt convincing as characters. But we don’t spend enough time with Zoe here or later in the film to understand her motivations. Her interaction with Ren feels too mechanical, and it’s hard to believe that their relationship is more than a plot device.
The film feels freer and more authentic when Ren reunites with his family and joins in the effort to plan the funeral. His sister, Lee (Brittany Snow), has already started planning the service with their mother’s ex-husband, Rick (David Arquette). Ren and Lee have a frosty relationship, fueled by their mother’s favoritism and exacerbated by Ren’s evasiveness. He avoided his sister’s calls and rarely visited her when their mother was undergoing aggressive cancer treatment in the hospital. Lee chastises his brother for his jokes, which he strategically uses to squash any real feelings. The siblings drive around the city performing various tasks, each clarifying their relationship to grief.
Through a series of sharp set-pieces—coffin shopping, preparing a eulogy with a priest (Stephen Park), organizing their mother’s closet—Ryland emphasizes the strangeness and inherent humor in death rituals. There’s an endearing quality to these scenes, which are bolstered by the cast’s enthusiastic comedic timing. (Jonas, whose performance falters at other times, holds his own here.)
It’s frustrating when The good half undermines its own momentum. Jagged transitions and overuse of slow-motion and needle-dropping moments add to the overall unevenness. Time that could have been spent fleshing out these characters further, clarifying their motivations, and exploring the emotional ambiguities and ambivalences provoked by grief is devoted to distracting filler moments. There’s a limit to the number of times we want to see Ren sulking loudly, striding across a room while a melancholy pop tune plays in the background.
These scenes, with their music-video-like sophistication, too often interrupt critical moments of character development. Just when we can begin to understand Lee as more than Ren’s foil, or Zoe as more than a convenient love interest, we find ourselves detached, subjected to more forced sentimentality. The cumulative effect is to distance us from these people and their problems, making it difficult to genuinely connect with The good half.