Released: 5th January
Seen: 7th January
Telling gay stories in film is kind of a landmine sometimes. It seems more often than not those stories deal with immense tragedy, loss of family or just having one of the leads getting a specific fatal illness and dying for a dramatic conclusion. It’s rare to see a film about gay joy or even just gay resilience, it feels like more and more films are just kind of depressing in tone and it’s kind of sad… so it takes someone pretty damn talented to take a film about a gay man dying and turn it into a charming, funny and also emotional tale that feels somewhat hopeful by the end. Fortunately, Dan Levy is just that damn talented and has brought us Good Grief, something so charming and sincere that it’s just so soothing to watch.
Good Grief starts at a Christmas party hosted by Oliver (Luke Evans) and Marc (Dan Levy), a married couple who work together with Oliver writing books and Marc illustrating them. They have a pretty nice life, great friends like Sophie (Ruth Negga) and Thomas (Himesh Patel) and a relationship that seems perfect… until Oliver leaves to go to the airport and gets into a car accident on the way, dying just up the road from the house where he’d been celebrating.
Cut to a year later and Marc is still dealing with the grief of loss, doing therapy and everything else when he learns that his happy marriage might not have been as happy as he thought because Oliver had a secret life in Paris for the last year of their relationship. Fuelled by grief, anger and a need to know what their relationship had really been about, Marc goes to Paris, dragging Sophie and Thomas with him, to try and figure out just what Oliver had been hiding from him.
What Good Grief handles better than most films is the reality of grief, the strange numb feeling that comes with trying to move on and just cope with the day-to-day. The way that things aren’t dealt with right away, that even a year later there’s still paperwork to deal with and strange things to discover about the person you lost. It’s not going for extreme emotion here, it’s being surprisingly realistic about the situation and how it can just dull the senses or how you might make a sarcastic joke about your grief just to cope. There’s something truly relatable about it all, we all know someone like Marc who puts on the best brave face possible even in the face of something so truly life-changing happening to them and it’s easy to just empathize with him throughout the film.
Cleverly, Good Grief avoids making itself too tragic to be enjoyable, it knows when to linger on the raw emotion of the moment but also when to give the characters a chance to have fun. Grief is a weird thing but it’s not a 24/7 thing, there are moments of joy between the sadness and that gives the film an interesting emotional arc to work with. The audience has moments to breathe and relax before the next emotional punch is thrown, making them hit harder when they do. Hell, it’ll throw you moments to laugh even during the sad moments, we’ve all been at a funeral where there’s one speech where everyone is side-eyeing each other at what they’re hearing because it’s so bonkers but no one says anything and this film has a moment that’s just like that.
Where Good Grief falters is in how it handles the endings of some storylines, like the romance that blossoms between Marc and a local French man or just meeting the person Oliver was leading a second life with, these stories don’t get to really have the kind of cathartic ending that they need. It’s kind of the downside to the natural realism that the film goes for, in reality these stories might not have interesting or satisfying endings but in film, they kind of need to. A character just vanishing from a story is noticeable when it feels like they’re actually adding something interesting before they vanish. It kind of makes the film itself sputter to a finish that’s less emotionally satisfying than it could’ve been, leaving everything on an “Oh maybe it’ll be fine” with so many raw emotions still needing to be dealt with. Again, it’s realistic, but it’s narratively unsatisfying.
The thing that helps Good Grief the most is that every other element of the film is so well handled. The performances are universally great, there’s a real chemistry between the central 3 friends and Dan Levy is just generally so talented that he’s made writing/directing/starring seem like it’s easy as hell to do. Visually the film knows when to pull back just enough that the dialogue can shine and when to push in for the unique romance that comes with filming in Paris. It all blends together to create this sense of comfort that surrounds the grief at the core of the story, acting as an emotional cushion so you can get through everything safely.
Good Grief is just a comforting film, one that provides a simple story about loss and friendship without getting too intense. It’s the kind of film you can put on anytime and be fine, it’s Good Grief but not Great Grief. With a lot of raw charm just helping it float on through, Good Grief might not be the most memorable or exciting film but it’s a good comfort movie that’ll let you have just enough of everything to feel good by the end of it.
Movie Meister Reviews 