The Good Mother: Relentlessly bad

The Good Mother (2023) • View trailer

NO STARS. Rated R, for profanity, violence and drug content

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

I cannot imagine why someone of Hilary Swank’s stature signed on to something this dreadful.

 

This isn’t merely a bad film; it’s also badly made. Bizarre camera placement. (Who frames a two-shot so that half of one person is cut off?) Wildly inappropriate choices of music, at bewilderingly wrong moments. Frequent night-time and deserted building set-ups so poorly illuminated that it’s impossible to tell what’s happening.

 

After her son is killed in what appears to be a drug deal gone bad, Marissa (Hilary Swank,
right) reluctantly teams up with his pregnant girlfriend Paige (Olivia Cooke), in order
to figure out what actually went down.

That said, I wish cinematographer Charlotte Hornsby had just left the cap on her camera lens, and fully spared us 90 minutes of misery.

Somebody should rip up Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s Directors Guild card; he shouldn’t be let near another film shoot. But his feeble efforts at helming this misfire pale when compared to the script he co-wrote with Madison Harrison: absolutely the most ridiculous, atrociously contrived bit of nonsense I’ve seen in years.

 

None of these characters feels genuine. Not even Swank can breathe life into her starring role. The so-called plot lurches forward only because every key character behaves like an imbecile at all times. 

 

The result is nothing but a string of “jump the shark” moments. On top of which, the plot’s supposed “surprise reveal” is blindingly obvious from the start.

 

Marissa (Swank) is a newspaper journalist in Albany, NY, whose career has stalled in the wake of her husband’s death a few years back. (One wonders why she continues to mourn, given that she later admits he was an abusive jerk: merely one of many details this misbegotten script can’t justify.) As the film begins, she’s shattered by the news that her estranged younger son — Michael (Harrison, in a fleeting acting cameo), a drug addict — has just been shot dead.

 

This comes as no real surprise to Marisa’s other son, Toby (Jack Reynor), a police officer who has been tracking the local distribution of fentanyl-laced heroin, and believes that Michael and longtime friend Ducky (Hopper Penn) were involved. When Michael’s seven-months-pregnant girlfriend Paige (Olivia Cooke) shows up at the funeral, Marissa loses control, believing her to be the “bad influence” in Michael’s life.

 

The two women subsequently reach an uneasy alliance — a moment that neither actress can sell — when Paige insists that Ducky couldn’t possibly have killed his best friend; it simply doesn’t make sense.

 

That evening, Paige goes through Michael’s things and finds a suitcase containing two large baggies of heroin. Just as she’s absorbing the implications, two men break into her apartment; she barely escapes with the suitcase. With nowhere else to go, Paige shows up at Marissa’s house, first hiding the suitcase in the front porch crawlspace; she removes oneof the bags (!) and hands it to Marissa and Toby.

 

To Toby’s obvious concern, the two women decide to play Nancy Drew, in order to a) find Ducky; b) determine if he did or didn’t kill Michael; c) find possible witnesses to the young man’s slaying; and d) figure out who broke into Paige’s place.

 

All while everybody mostly ignores the elephant in the room: Marissa’s return slide into alcoholism. (We cringe every time she gets behind the wheel of a car.)

Flag Day: Don't raise it

Flag Day (2021) • View trailer

2.5 stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity, drug use and violence

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

The fact-based story here is compelling and astonishing: the saga of a young woman who survives not only a horrific parent — a pathological liar and toxic “entrepreneur” — but her own dangerous detour into life on the streets, before achieving an epiphany that helps her not only survive, but thrive.

 

Jennifer (Dylan Penn), determing to reform her deadbeat, unreliable father (Sean Penn),
moves in with him and undertakes a serious makeover effort.

Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth’s script is adapted from journalist Jennifer Vogel’s searing 2004 memoir, Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father’s Counterfeit Life. Vogel also granted considerable assistance during production, so she clearly approved — and assured the authenticity (for the most part) — of this depiction of her early years.

Scary thought.

 

Director Sean Penn clearly intended this as a showcase for his actress daughter, Dylan, and she does her old man proud; her persuasive, deeply moving performance is all over the emotional map. We grieve for her character. Repeatedly.

 

Too bad Dylan’s old man didn’t return the favor.

 

As director, Sean Penn’s aggressively arty “style” pretty much destroys this film. His unrelenting, tight-tight-tight close-ups and up-the-nostrils angles are insufferable, and he relies on them throughout the entire film. It’s the ultimate insult: the lazy, TV-soap-opera affectation of a director who doesn’t trust his actors to carry a given moment.

 

Penn also favors jittery camerawork — I wondered if cinematographer Daniel Moder had been ordered to bounced on a trampoline — and often detours into blurry, grainy, 16mm “memory moments” intended to mimic sloppy home movies.

 

Just about every time Dylan Penn hits a crucial dramatic scene, her father steals focus by calling too much attention to his self-indulgent directorial tics and hiccups.

 

It’s an impressive job of sabotage … which is pretty damn ironic. How could he not have realized that he was ruining his own daughter’s fine work?

 

After a brief prologue in the early 1990s — which telegraphs the story’s conclusion — we’re introduced to the dysfunctional Vogel family: father John (Sean Penn), wife Patty (Katheryn Winnick) and adolescent children Jennifer (Jadyn Rylee) and Nick (Beckam Crawford). The adult Jennifer (Dylan Penn) narrates the details of their tempestuous upbringing, highlighting the degree to which John’s chronic unreliability exacerbates Patty’s fragile insecurity.

 

It’s the mid-1970s. John blows what little money he makes on flamboyant gestures, and then can’t make rent or put food on the table. Patty knows it’s just a matter of time before they’ll once again throw all their worldly possessions into the beat-up station wagon, and drive to some other Midwestern town, where John will somehow con their way into another short-term home.