All Good Things

Mediocre Thriller with Amazing Performance

Plot:

A love story and murder mystery set against the backdrop of a New York real estate dynasty in the 1980s, inspired by the most notorious missing person’s case in New York history. Ryan Gosling portrays David Marks, the son of a powerful real estate tycoon, was suspected but never tried for killing his wife Katie Marks (played by Kirsten Dunst) who disappeared in 1982 and was never found.

The original screenplay uses newly discovered facts, court records and speculation as the foundation for a story of family, obsession, love and loss. Did David really kill Katie? Will the truth finally be revealed?

Release Date: December 3, 2010
Distributor: Magnolia Pictures (US), The Weinstein Company (International)
Directed By: Andrew Jarecki (this is his movie’s debut)
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Kirsten Dunst, Frank Langella, Kristen Wiig
Budget: $20,000,000
Gross Revenue: $578,382 (USA) $644,535 (worldwide)

Review:

I’ve never heard about this movie before, that’s why I’ve only seen it almost a year after the released date. I was interested to this movie after read the convincing All Good Things review wrote by Rebecca Wilson at flickboom.com.

All Good Things is inspired by the real life of Robert Durst (named as David Marks in this movie), a son of New York real estate mogul who’s suspected of killing his wife, Kathleen (Katie Marks). The first one-third of the film tells the story of how David meets with Katie, falls in love, then gets marry and opens a health food store called as All Good Things in Vermont.

Happiness doesn’t last long, the pair have to move back to New York because they can’t afford their own life without the support from David’s father, the real-estate magnate Sanford Marks. Have to work in stressful condition under his father’s rules reveals David’s dark side, something that he kept buried over the years, something that Katie wouldn’t expect at all from him. From this point on, the movie tries to turn from romantic genre into a chilling thriller, which I say pretty unsuccessful.

The cast of this film are good, they already gave their best performance. Ryan Gosling turns from lovable character into a cold-blood killer who has a mental-health problem. Kirsten Dunst appears with her usual sweetness, which also fragile that makes us sympathize her. Experienced actor Frank Langella, plays as Sanford Marks, always know how to make audiences despise his antagonist character.

The problem lies within the plot and directing style. I don’t have problem with the gloomy set, which actually good and realistic. It just the pace is incredibly slow and painful to watch. The suspense isn’t well-built either, it all pretty predictable from the start to the end. There are also many blank spots in the story, mainly the one connected to David’s past. We knew that David saw her mother killed herself when he was a child, but is it enough to turn someone into a psychopath?

I guess the movie tries to hard to be faithful with the real-life story of Robert Durst, that it forgets on how to satisfying the audiences. I very much agree with Rebecca Wilson review (which I’ve mentioned earlier), that you should see this movie is you want to see Ryan Gosling darker and chilling performance in a suspense with Alfred Hitchock’s style. In the other hand, you also won’t miss anything if you just skip this one, because this film offers a very few other good things!

By the way, if you want to read a different style of movie’s reviewing, which is called as “film reviews without the suck”, you should check flickboom.com. Their See It or Not feature is very easy to read and very useful to help to decide whether a movie is worth watching or not.

My Rating: B-

IMDb user rating: 6.3/10

Rotten Tomatoes meter: 33%

Metacritic: 57/100

Yahoo! critics: B-

Yahoo! users: B

Your Ratings: (1 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)
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Note that ratings and gross revenue are based from when this review was written, so the values might already changed by now.