THE GOOD MOTHER (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Good Mother, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 31, 2023

Torn between noble intentions and the predictable plotting of a formulaic mystery, The Good Mother feels either unfinished or like the condensed version of a more detailed story. There's certainly something to screenwriters Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, who also directed, and Madison Harrison's tale of a family ripped apart by addiction and struggling to find meaning in the shadow of death. The issue of drug addiction, though, comes across as a plot device here, while the only meaning worth finding in this story, apparently, is the solution to a crime.

That crime occurs right at the start of the movie, as a young man runs through the streets of Albany, only to be confronted by a pickup truck near the place where he's living. He's shot dead, although the editing of the prologue and the relative silence of the characters after the fact mean that this vital detail isn't revealed until later. One wonders if that's a further attempt to add some empty spaces to the straightforward puzzle of the plot or if the filmmakers forgot that the information hadn't been made clear until later.

The mother of the dead man is Marissa (Hilary Swank), a reporter at a local newspaper who hasn't written anything in a while and edits shallow online pieces that she resents in order to keep her job. A dependency on alcohol helps that in her mind, too. Her other son is Toby (Jack Reynor), a cop, who breaks the news to Marissa about her younger, troubled son.

If anything, Swank's performance, as a mother who is intrinsically conflicted about the fate of a child on whom she had essentially given up hope, suggests a much stronger character piece that's right there in front of the filmmakers to tackle. Marissa is grieving, yes and of course, but in Swank's work, there are also layers of guilt here—for what she didn't do, how she treated her younger son as if he didn't exist, what might be relief that all of this is finished, exactly as she had expected and feared.

Instead, Marissa puts on her intrepid reporter's hat—figuratively, obviously, although an actual hat would have fit in just fine with the movie's quick shift in tone and purpose. There's a murder to be solved and a possible conspiracy to be uncovered, since someone felt the need to kill this low-end drug dealer or someone put the son in someone else's sights.

It is strange how little the movie seems to actually care about the build-up to and the circumstances of the son's death. The screenplay just tosses out some information about fentanyl-laced heroin, suggests one suspect in the person of the son's friend, and hopes that the topical subject matter and the air of a mystery will be enough to keep our interest.

It's not, and without many details to analyze or to serve as a distraction from the truth, the final answer to this murder is so easy to guess that one character might as well profess guilt along with a very suspicious action that occurs within the first 20 minutes or so. That's beside the point of the movie's success or failure, because anyone can correctly hypothesize the solution to a murder mystery with an accuracy rate aligned with the number of characters in the story (Then again, the odds are entirely in the audience's favor with so few characters here). The problem in this case is that the whole movie is dependent upon the mystery, and it simply isn't much of one, in terms of either surprise or content.

The focus on that aspect of the story, though, ultimately keeps these characters and their tricky relationships at bay. We have Marissa, of course, who might have been a rich character had the story cared even half as much about her emotional state through the whole movie as it does in those early scenes. There's also her relationship with her surviving son, the family's pride and, perhaps, a constant reminder of feelings of failure about the dead child. Finally, there's Paige (Olivia Cooke), the dead son's pregnant girlfriend, who does more than half of the actual sleuthing here and, despite Cooke's best efforts to add some verve to the character, just falls in line with the clue-by-clue routine of the plot.

Little is left to be said, except that the solution to the mystery is obvious, some third-act actions defy common sense (a killer who should know better than to leave so much evidence behind and a covert pursuit that includes a baby, solely for a variety of manipulative reasons), and a final note of ambiguity that's hollow and revolves around an empty gesture. The Good Mother does a disservice to some potentially fascinating characters and important subject matter.

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