Chris: Where were you?
Sam: Here.
Chris: You just upped and left. Well, I just don’t get it.
Sam: I didn’t think you would.
India Donaldson’s debut feature Good One immediately brings to mind the work of Kelly Reichardt. Not only does it have an appreciation for specific natural landscapes; but it juxtaposes the grand disappointment, quiet rage, jealousy, and the entitlement some experience in tranquil spaces. Some think they own the forest; others are trying to see the vast wonder of the immersive place.
Using Kelly Reichardt as a comparison point is not a way to undermine Donaldson’s vision. Equally there are aspects of Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace. Both directors have a specific empathy for people who are struggling on the outskirts. They also speak to a particular experience that women, young and old, have when navigating unhealthy male behaviour.
Lily Collias (also featured in Palm Trees and Powerlines) plays seventeen-year-old Sam. Sam is living in a New York City brownstone with her remarried father Chris (James Le Gros) and his younger wife Casey and their toddler. She spends most of her time in her room with her girlfriend Jessie (Sumaya Bouhbal) avoiding whatever larger family dysfunction is going on outside of her tiny personal space. She’s a budding artist. She’s keenly perceptive and intelligent; yet she fits into the category of being neither seen nor heard unless someone expects something of her.
Sam will soon head off to college, so she is going to on her annual hiking trip with Chris, who works in upper corporate management. The “Daddy Daughter” ritual is something she is expected to participate in. Ostensibly it’s Chris’ bonding time with Sam; but in reality, it’s his own nostalgia for the man he once was before he was burdened by parenthood, and women.
Chris is a taskmaster in the house. He berates Casey for not knowing where his things are, but he also realises Casey doesn’t really care. She’s busy enough raising a small child. He’s treading the fine line between needing to be coddled by the women around him and demanding they recognise his “Alpha” masculinity. The one person he feels he can rely on to do both is Sam.
The camping trip to the Catskills is something he also does with his friend Matt (Danny McCarthy). This year it was supposed to be a quartet with Chris, Sam, Matt, and his son Casey. Matt’s life has imploded. He was caught cheating on his wife Stephanie and Casey doesn’t want to have anything to do with him. Once a successful actor on a syndicated show and now he does corporate sponsorship gigs. His work has dried up and booking commercials for IBS and other middle-aged ailments is a career achievement. He’s broke, resentful, and adrift. He can’t face up to the fact that any of what has happened could be of his making so it’s the fault of his “bitch” ex-wife. It’s the fault of women. Somehow, it’s also Chris’ fault for being more successful than he is in middle age. They knew each other in college and expected they’d both succeed. Matt believes only Chris has with his expensive home and “hot young wife.”
The purgatorial drive to the Catskills defines the relationship between the two men, but also their instinctual misogyny. Matt seems jocular with Sam, because he feels like she’s the one he can partially use as a weapon against Chris, and a comparison point as a “good child” when it comes to Casey. Chris tells Sam to stop texting her girlfriend, but when he gets a call from the office, he throws the phone at her to text the reply. Chris and Matt joke about not giving in to women because they’ll expect too much in the future. It isn’t a joke.
Chris uses Sam to prove he’s the better father and provider. All the while Sam is taking on the emotional and at times physical burden of two self-involved men. Matt asks her inappropriate questions about her relationship with Jessie. He and Chris presume she’s a vegan because that’s what the “kids these days do.” Sam points out that she lives with Chris and he sees her eat everyday – he hasn’t noticed she’s not a vegan? They also haven’t noticed that Sam is constantly going to the bathroom to change her tampon.
They don’t care that it could be seen as uncomfortable for Sam to have to share a room with only two beds in it with them. Or that she is the one sleeping on the floor without a pillow when they arrive in the room drunk. Chris wakes Sam early. Matt complains that he hasn’t had enough sleep, and no one has made him breakfast. The motel is too cheap. No one packed anything for him.
If they do ask Sam a question, they almost immediately reject the answer if it isn’t what they want. They also don’t listen to her when it comes to what she considers natural boundaries for a teen on the cusp of womanhood. By the time the men reach the Catskills instead of marvelling at the exquisiteness of the national park, they trudge along in resentful competition with each other. Sam is the one pitching the tents, getting water, being told how to make camp food. She’s trying to breathe but they are both suffocating her.
When they make camp in one spot Matt and Charlie immediately welcome a group of college aged male backpackers to join their site. It doesn’t matter that it could be a potentially threatening experience for Sam. What matters to them is reliving their youth through them. Chris immediately begins to tell them the places he’s hiked as an “expert,” the trio tell Chris and Matt about all the places they’ve been, which far outclass Chris. They also spout pseudo philosophy about being connected to nature (usually because one of them had a girlfriend who was into some pagan stuff). Like the older men they are claiming ownership of the feminine, and of “mother nature” herself. Sam quietly calls Matt and Chris fools and one of the younger hikers tells her that according to the Tarot a fool is a wise man. “It’s good to be a fool.”
There is nothing inherent that connects women to the earth over men. That’s a distinct binary which should be avoided. However, there is a quiet truth that certain men have decided everything belongs to them via patriarchal privilege. The culture of middle-aged anomie filters down to both men and women. They raise the question “Do you think this is what I wanted from my life?” but the people they are asking are often not the people who made any decisions in their lives.
The law of treading quietly and softly and the seven principles of Leave No Trace mean very little to Chris and Matt. But they are the laws they have imposed on Sam not only in the Catskills but in her day-to-day life as the “Good One” the daughter who does not complain. The daughter who tends to wounds and wounded egos. The daughter who watches as the two men allow their worst instincts define them. A father who knows that his friend has drunkenly made advances on his teenage daughter and tells her to “Stop ruining things,” and “Let them just have a nice day,” while they drape their bodies over a natural rock spring baking in the sun as if that space belongs only to them.
Matt says to Sam, “You’re pretty smart and observant. Observe me.” She has been forced to observe him the whole time. Every piece of good advice Sam gives about how he can heal the rift between himself and his son Dylan is ignored. She’s giving the advice based on what she went through with her father when he left her mother. “Don’t say bad things about Stephanie in front of him… don’t make him choose.” When Matt asks Sam when Casey will stop hating him, her answer is, “Probably never.”
Sam is in a period of transition where she is defining herself. Her queerness baffles and annoys both Chris and Matt. It is also meaningless to Matt when he crosses a line he can’t uncross with Sam. Donaldson uses slow building tension amidst the glory of the Catskills to show how incremental but fundamental aggression against who Sam is and what she represents to both of the men will lead to her finally deciding enough is enough.
Good One isn’t about suddenly waking up to the fact that a parent is not a good person. It’s about waking up to the fact that nothing you do will improve them, and they don’t want to be improved. The cacophony of Chris and Matt’s disappointment and bitterness drowns out everything and everyone around them. They don’t see where they are. Sam sees precisely where she is, and who she has been, and is actively deciding who she is.
Circling back to Kelly Reichardt, James Le Gros played an adulterous husband in Certain Women who undermined Michelle Williams’ Gina and Laura Dern’s Laura. He also appeared in Night Moves and Showing Up. He has worked consistently with people such as Gus Van Sant. It is unlikely a coincidence that he became the perfect actor to portray Chis. Good Girl also makes one imagine what it would be life if you were being dragged along by the protagonists of Old Joy while they work out their issues with each other.
In a particularly metatextual flourish Danny McCarthy’s best-known role over the years was on Prison Break. As Matt he epitomises a man who believes he is owed something for his past glory and projects his lack of self-worth onto anyone he can. Danny McCarthy has, ironically, been given a role which will cement his reputation as an excellent and undervalued character actor.
Most importantly, there is Lily Collias understated and arresting performance as Sam. The audience is watching through her point of view — so we see what she does. The sublimity of the Catskills, the ridiculousness of the men who seek to control and shape her. Donaldson’s direction ensures we are not only watching through Sam’s eyes but also looking into them. Sam is so often spoken over that the audience hears her through what she isn’t saying. What Sam does, and why is conveyed through gestures of weariness, broken and unbroken connections, discontent, and anger.
Wilson Cameron’s cinematography expresses both the ecstatic beauty of the Catskills and the internal and external claustrophobia Sam is experiencing. His camera is as observational and curious as Sam. The questions India Donaldson and Cameron’s cinematography are asking include: How can you not be present in your own life? How can you become so disconnected from everything that you can’t even see what is right in front of you and acknowledge that it is more than you are?
Good One recognises the feeling of carrying someone else’s pain, ego, and expectations on your back and turns that metaphor into an actual experience for Sam. Placing her hands into the earth and feeling a part of the loam. Seeing a small creature like a slug and identifying with it. Following the flight path of a bird and wishing she could be that bird. Knowing that deep down she has far more in common with the animals forced to live in subsistence when their environment has become someone else’s. Knowing that she is more likely to be attacked by the men around her than the Grizzly bear they fear.
India Donaldson’s debut feature is a remarkable coming of age film. Sam setting herself free by no longer being the good one and doing something only a bad one would, is a primal scream which echoes on.
Director: India Donaldson
Cast: Lily Collias, Sumaya Bouhbal, Diana Irvine
Writer: India Donaldson
