Review: The Good Half (2023)
Nick Jonas stars as a young writer who returns home for his mother's funeral
The Good Half (2023)
Directed by Robert Schwartzman
In this family dramedy, a young man who’s left Cleveland to be a writer in L.A. returns home after his mother dies. There he processes with the surviving family members: his sister, their father, and the deceased’s husband. To add a touch of romance, he goes on several dates with a woman he met on the eastbound plane.
This skeleton of a script could be delivered with real power, but it would take more than writer Brett Ryland is capable of. The script is by the numbers in terms of its structure and the scenes that roll out one after another. There are few surprises.
Thus the whole thing comes down to the performances. And to tell the truth, I enjoyed Nick Jonas as Renn (Renn?), the young man returning home. He has fine comic timing and the camera loves him. Brittany Snow, as his repressed older sister who bore the brunt of caring for their mother while she grew sick and died of cancer, has less to do. Obviously it’s a harder job — to express what a character is feeling underneath her self-imposed pressure to keep it together and organize the funeral, and Snow acquits herself well. In a movie few people are going to see, and a role no one will remember, she shows herself to be a thorough professional.
Also good as the mother is Elisabeth Shue, but the script has her appearing in person after she’s dead, in the scene pictured above, where the family meets soon after Renn’s arrival to work out some details. She appears at this meeting in a restaurant, then excuses herself; the subsequent dialogue doesn’t make it clear whether she was a projection or delusion on Renn’s part, or whose. It’s very confusing — for several minutes I didn’t understand exactly who had died.
The worst part of the movie is the first scene, where Renn meets Zoey (Alexandra Shipp) on the plane heading for Cleveland. The scene is both underwritten and too long, and she delivers some terrible line readings. For a moment the movie absolutely sucks. But the director, Robert Schwartzman — brother of Jason, son of Talia Shire, middle name Coppola — pulls out of this crash dive and restores enough equilibrium so that everyone can do their jobs. He doesn’t deserve much credit for it. This is his fifth or sixth film and he chose a mediocre script by an unknown writer. Surely there are better scripts out there.
I saw this film on a special program of some kind. It was a one-night-only presentation of the movie — whose official opening date was today, July 23 — which came with an aftershow of Kiernan Shipka interviewing Schwarzman and Jonas for about 20 minutes. That’s not really worth sitting through, unless you’re a big fan of Nick Jonas, who comes across as sincere and heartfelt. I do think that he, along with Brittany Snow, deserves credit for bringing professionalism to what is otherwise a mediocre indie.
