With a debut film, it’s easy to credit influence. You could watch India Donaldson’s Good One and notice that it’s all-natural set pieces and lived-in performances recall the earthy existentialism of Kelly Reichardt; or you may peg her pithy dialogue as similar to mumblecore-era Greta Gerwig. And both of those statements would be accurate. It’s much harder to give a first-time filmmaker credit for something unique, because we don’t have the context of their larger cinematic language. Think of Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, a directorial debut so ethereal in execution that it was hard to even articulate what made it so spectacular – but we all knew we were watching something amazing. Good One is not as good as Aftersun, but it did make me ponder the strength of its methods in similar ways.
This is a slight film, a story pared down to its essentials. The screenplay possesses an economy similar to its characters who are spending a weekend camping in the woods of upstate New York. Our main character is Sam (a fantastic Lily Collias), a seventeen-year-old on the precipice of college who agrees to go camping with her severe but caring father, Chris (James Le Gros). The plan is that they will be joined by Chris’s best friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy), and Matt’s son, but a domestic spat means that Matt is joining them alone. So Sam is stuck spending a weekend with two irascible men of middle age, sharing space not only with them but also with their advanced melancholy and damaged egos. Annoyed, Sam would prefer to stay in New York City with her girlfriend, Jessie (Sumaya Bouhbal), but she musters on, willing to give the tightly-wound Chris the trip he’s looking forward to.
Donaldson expertly ladles out the history, both acknowledged and unacknowledged, between all interested parties. Chris is divorced from Sam’s mother, but is now married to a much younger woman with whom he’s had a recent baby. Matt is more recently divorced, a rupture caused by his own misbehavior, a not insignificant reason his son refuses to join their camping trip. Where Chris is anal and humorless, Matt is gregarious and careless. He packs too much but still manages to forget a sleeping bag. He keeps food inside his tent, one of the cardinal sins of Northeastern camping. Matt does his best to balance out Chris’s ornery attitude, sometimes for Sam’s benefit but more often for his own. When we meet him we fear his political incorrectness, but Sam is used to his antics, and even occasionally appreciates his unctuous jokes.
The dialogue throughout Good One is funny but effortless, and Donaldson so precisely displays the levels of intimacy between our three characters. The tensions between them compete over the course of the trip, culminating in a moment of quiet devastation that lays out the meaning of everything we’ve watched beforehand. We understand, within the film’s tight 89 minutes, how these three very different people have come to feel like a family, which makes the emotional betrayals that much more heartbreaking. The first hour of Good One is mostly observational. A sharp travelogue of people fighting against their reality in an attempt to have a good time. Despite the odds, they appear to be succeeding – until they aren’t. When Donaldson reveals the stakes, its remarkable how easily the tone shifts into one of crackling dread.
In the end, Sam is forced to come to grips with the shortcomings of her father, big and small. In many ways, it’s the smaller ones that end up hurting her the most. Collias’s performance of Sam is refreshingly authentic. She has the ever-present angst of an American teenager, but the reality is that she’s actually putting a lot of effort into making her father happy. When that effort is not repaid in her more vulnerable moments, the tragedy feels monumental. Collias beautifully sells that tragedy, understanding the small scale of her experience but refusing to sell short just how shattered she feels. As Chris, Le Gros is at his grizzled best, playing a father plagued with emotional grievances. His strict rule-making only exacerbates his short temper, mostly at Matt but occasionally at Sam too. It’s the kind of character Le Gros could play in his sleep, but he instead gives it real humanity and feeling.
McCarthy is both the film’s wild card and its comedic relief. His entrance spells trouble, and his caustic sense of humor feels born to butt heads with Gen Z. But Matt is also unable to contain his sadness, frequently mentioning his guilt, his divorce, and his ruined relationship with his son. McCarthy is playing a very difficult character, and his measured performance gives Good One a much needed element of danger. It’s ultimately a testament to Donaldson’s skill that the whirling tensions between all three of them are at such a dormant pitch that we can’t predict what will happen, even if this film is (on its face) a pretty standard coming-of-age story. This is an incredible debut for Donaldson and a spectacular spotlight for Collias who, at 19, may end up being a very exciting performer.
Written and Directed by India Donaldson