Solid as a Rock
By Matthew Eng
Good One
Dir. India Donaldson, U.S., Metrograph Pictures
The debut feature of writer-director India Donaldson pivots on a young woman’s realization that it is sometimes wisest to keep those we love at an arm’s length. This can be a bitter pill to swallow. But it can also be a tonic. Donaldson’s drama finely evokes the uniquely adolescent experience of family slackening and tightening, when the desire to linger in the intimate embrace of kin must be routinely measured against the gnawing need to determine and assert one’s independence. In outline, this is by no means uncharted terrain in American cinema: I could just as easily be describing Lady Bird, with its combustible bond between a venturesome Catholic schoolgirl and her importunate mother. What differentiates Good One from any number of coming-of-age narratives is the patient grace of its construction and its rigorous treatment of discerning youth confronting parental inadequacy. Set over the course of a three-day camping trip in upstate New York’s Ulster County, Donaldson’s equanimous, mesmerizing film floats like a butterfly, but its shrewdest insights sting like a bee.
When we first encounter Sam (Lily Collias), a queer, 17-year-old Brooklyn high schooler on the cusp of college, she is preparing for a camping trip with her divorced father Chris (James Le Gros), who is closing in on 60 with a younger girlfriend and a newborn son. Sam is the film’s protagonist and its primary observer, a role thrown into further relief upon the arrival of Chris’s longtime friend Matt (Danny McCarthy), a brash, washed-up actor-turned-salesman and fellow divorcé who joins father and daughter on one of their long-standing excursions—albeit without his own teenage son, who bows out in explosive fashion at the last possible minute. Much of Good One functions as a hangout film in which Sam bears amused, skeptical witness to Chris and Matt’s well-worn bullshit, detecting and deflecting their crankiness, condescension, and inane logorrhea, periodically offering a cheeky rejoinder though seldom letting them crawl under her skin, even at their rudest and crudest. These are deeply unserious men, but their engorged egos take up space; a telling discourtesy occurs early on over lunch when Sam, in the midst of talking about her girlfriend’s college plans, is cut off without a care by Matt, who embarks on a tangent about his son’s disturbing browser history.
Sam does not strive to be one of the guys, nor is she particularly made to feel like one. (When the group crosses paths and sets up camp with a trio of young hikers, Sam goes practically unaddressed to the point of invisibility over the course of their meandering conversation.) More often, she is the buffer between Chris and Matt, whose enduring bond belies a competitive tension that manifests in both petty razzing and downright abrasive barbs. These exchanges are occasionally diverting, mainly due to the droll deliveries of Le Gros, one of the most dependable and unsung character actors of his generation, but their repetition and escalation are fittingly nettlesome. Chris lords his athleticism and outdoorsmanship, as well as his closeness to his daughter, over his laggardly, out-of-shape friend, painfully at odds with his son since his divorce.
Sam, when not mediating between the two, thanklessly performs the requisite caretaker duties: filtering their spring water, cooking their ramen, and cleaning their plates and utensils. As Sam’s labor becomes at once domestic and emotional, the gendered division among the group speaks for itself. In a striking, isolated split-diopter shot, the director and her cinematographer Wilson Cameron (a former visual effects producer making his feature debut as a DP) capture Sam changing her tampon behind a tree as the men impatiently wait in the background.
Donaldson’s confident, scrupulous eye for behavioral nuance enriches the conflicted dynamics that are the dramatic marrow of her film. Avoiding the natural perils of numerous Great Outdoors films, her economical screenplay lets the members of this triad injure and undermine each other. In a canny scene, Chris berates Matt for eating in the tent overnight and potentially endangering his daughter, whose own reassurances fail to defuse her dad’s bluster. Matt offers a sheepish apology, only to then collapse a tent onto Sam while she still sits inside it. How quickly our protagonist, the supposed object of their disagreement, becomes extraneous to both parties. Here and elsewhere, both men find new ways of diminishing Sam’s presence, invoking and upholding the vulnerable young woman as a voiceless liability and not a defiant, self-contained being close at hand.
Words are certainly significant to illustrating the film’s interpersonal dynamics, but the purpose they serve is neither explanatory nor diagnostic; the characters’ conduct tends to be more illuminating than their rambling and what they refrain from telling one another matters nearly as much as what they do disclose. This is never truer than in a sobering campfire conversation that decisively reorients these characters’ relationships and reveals that Donaldson’s beautiful if mostly placid film has a fair bit of dirt under its nails. As Chris and Matt vent about the breakdowns of their first marriages with ample self-pity, Sam pushes back against her dad’s framing of his divorce from her mom as some sort of involuntary calamity and, in doing so, evokes an off-screen history of paternal error and latent daughterly frustration. “The worst doesn’t just happen to you,” she asserts. “You’re involved in the process.” Collias shines in this extended dialogue as she does throughout the film, limning Sam’s transformation from dispassionate bystander to aggrieved party with artful understatement.
Good One is unimaginable without Collias’s emotional maturity and unfailing composure. Fixed in copious close-ups, her face is our trusted guidepost, its limpid gaze never losing its legibility or alertness as it evinces bemusement, concern, pity, and pique. I do not anticipate soon forgetting the look of commingled shock and sadness that overcomes the actress when Matt makes a terrible, suggestive remark to Sam that stops her—and the film—cold.
This is clearly a bruising moment for Sam, but the character has yet to face the full extent of the weekend’s affronts. Shaken by Matt’s comment, she is downright devastated by her dad’s blithe dismissal of it as Le Gros shrugs off Collias’s delicately braided discomfort with casual callousness. Here, the simple question “Can we just have a nice day?” becomes heartbreaking in its spineless sidestepping, an indelible parental letdown in seven words. The scene could possibly be described as a father failing to defend his daughter from unwanted male attention, but I think that Donaldson is attempting a knottier and less paternalistic turn for her protagonist. What appears to cut Sam deepest is the blanket refusal of her father to hear her out.
Donaldson’s remarkable debut is not so much a reaction to the #MeToo movement and mainstream reproofs of toxic masculinity as it is a meditation on what it means to be failed by a loved one and at long last shirk off the freight of filial obligation. It still feels rare to watch an American film about a young person’s disappointment with a parent that is so disinterested in sensational conflict and glib, patched-up resolutions. With quiet iconoclasm, Good One looks askance at the obedience, resilience, and devotion that parents hope for in their progeny, traits that Sam gradually comes to reject. Donaldson might have dwelled longer in her protagonist’s destabilizing uncertainty before delivering her film to its lightly vengeful conclusion, but the force of its final beat is undeniable. The film ends with Sam quite literally in the driver’s seat. Her eyes are narrowed but afire with the power of perception, the thrill of suddenly seeing someone more clearly than ever before. This trip has at least offered her a teachable moment. She’ll remember it.