All Good Things (opens January 7th at the Cedar Lee Theater)

[ALL GOOD THINGS opens in Cleveland on Friday January 7th at the Cedar Lee Theater]

Review by Bob Ignizio

Although the names and some of the details have been changed, ALL GOOD THINGS recounts with a fair degree of accuracy the events surrounding the disappearance of Scarsdale housewife Kathleen McCormack in 1982, a case that remains officially unsolved. Kirsten Dunst plays McCormack surrogate Katie McCarthy, a working class girl who has only recently left the nest and moved into her first apartment when she meets David Marks (Ryan Gosling), son of wealthy New York real estate magnate Sanford Marks (Frank Langella). David and Katie fall in love and get married, despite his father's disapproval. At first the couple is happy running a health food store in Vermont, but when David's father pressures him into returning to New York and the family business, things get rocky. The couple fight about having children, and David becomes more controlling and abusive. Eventually Katie resolves to get a divorce, but before she can go through with it, she disappears.

We learn all this in flashbacks as a much older David gives testimony in a court case, although we don't know until late in the film exactly what he's in court for. Through David's memories we see more than he tells, allowing the filmmaker's to show one possible truth about what really happened. But even in David's memories, certain key details remain fuzzy, perhaps because he can't bear to recall them, or because his mind has erased them altogether. Regardless of whether David was directly responsible for Katie's disappearance, there's still the mystery of why his personality changed so much. The film offers some possible root causes, but there's no simple explanation for why someone who had been a loving and supportive husband would become the complete opposite almost as if a switch had been flipped.

Gosling does a great job of making David both sinister and sympathetic. When his personality suddenly changes, we're taken aback almost as much as Katie is. Up to that point, we've genuinely liked this character, and even after the shift, we're not sure to what degree he's a villain and to what degree he's a victim. Dunst does a fantastic job as well. Her performance conveys a a smart, strong and independent woman. She knows something is wrong with her husband, and that she ought to leave. But she also still thinks that somewhere inside is the man she fell in love with, and it isn't easy accepting that he's gone.

Director Andrew Jarecki was nominated for a “Best Documentary” Oscar in 2003 for CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS. With ALL GOOD THINGS, he smoothly makes the transition to narrative film. Jarecki's documentary background comes in handy when realism is called for, but he proves equally adept at crafting more cinematic visuals, such as the recurring scene of a truck driving out onto a railroad bridge at night so that someone can drop garbage bags into the river below. 4 out of 4 stars.