Fridae

A lurid and sensationalistic possible cautionary tale, All Good Things is one of those sensationalized dramatizations of true-life unsolved mystery cases that is less of a whodunnit, as much as it involves the viewer in the reality and the situation surrounding the participants of the unsolved crime. It is a thriller whose purpose is not to thrill nor to keep the viewer in suspense, but in which both the thrills and suspense are mere tools to detailed character study.

The mystery at hand here involves David Marks (Ryan Gosling), heir to the Marks Real Estate Empire, and the mysterious disappearance of his wife Katie (Kirsten Dunst), whom he is believed to have killed. Possibly the only witness to his terrible crime is Deborah Lehrman, who was later found murdered by Malvern Bump. And Malvern Bump claims that David Marks goaded him into killing Deborah Lehrman. Those names despite my revelation are not the true mystery of the film, it doesn’t matter how he did it so much as why, and it doesn’t matter so much why so much as what the investigation takes us into the reality surrounding David Marks.

David Marks, it seems, grew as heir to his father Sanford Marks’ empire rather unwillingly. Sanford is a cold, clammy creature of a man, lacking or at best buried when it comes to expressing warmth or love: something he did not show even when David’s troubled mother committed suicide. Small wonder that David finds comfort in the simple life that he starts when Katie enters his life and they head to Vermont to open their health food store, the “All Good Things” of the title, and in Katie’s sunny, cheery accepting behaviour.

Such behaviour however, may be too accepting for accommodating even David’s “decision” to become heir to the family business and engage in the soul-crushing endeavours of running errands for his father’s empire, which includes onerous tasks like visiting adult movie theatres and strip clubs. Small wonder that their marriage sours and drives Katie up the wall, forcing Katie to even undertake a few underhanded means of her own against the man she claims to love...

It is a testament to the strength of both the script and Ryan Gosling’s performance as one of the best young actors of his generation that the film never loses sight of the fact that David Marks might be at the end of the day another victim of forces beyond his control, which one might identify in this case as the corrosive effects of capitalism and the rat race on simple human relationships, from how it transforms a father figure into a monster and how it breaks apart a honestly loving marriage. As time goes on, David Marks becomes a hollowed out, increasingly soulless figure, forever running away from himself and towards what he wants to be to others, but doomed never to reach there.

While the plot is for all reasons as predictable as it should be, the execution and performances lift it above mere sensationalism. Kirsten Dunst turns in one of her strongest performances in a long career since her spooky turn in Interview with the Vampire as a woman bewildered, perplexed and vulnerable in the face of the changes overcoming the man she thought she knew. Philip Baker Hall is also poignant in his as sad-sack delusional Malvern Bump, and Frank Langella is appropriately a monster as Sanford even when he is ill and dying, combining the controlling manipulativeness that combines trait of both an overbearing parent and a ruthless corporate CEO. Genre fans may be tempted to recall Langella’s role as Skeletor in Masters of the Universe.

All Good Things is a whodunnit without an answer, because the true revelation is in the process. And what a revelation it is. A good appetizer before the rounds of Oscar bait films come on, it is a delicious, meaty, bloody stew of a film.