Susan Granger’s review of “All Good Things” (Magnolia Pictures)
The old adage “Truth is stranger than fiction” applies here – because if a screenwriter concocted this strange tale, no producer in his right mind would buy it.
Spanning three decades, the story revolves around David Marks (Ryan Gosling), the troubled scion of domineering Sanford Marks (Frank Langella), a successful New York real estate entrepreneur. As a youngster, David watched his mother commit suicide and he’s never come to terms with it, according to his friend Deborah (Lily Rabe). So when he meets and marries Katie McCarthy (Kirsten Dunst), a working-class ‘shiksa’ from Long Island, he tries to get away from familial responsibilities by moving to Vermont and opening a health-food store called All Good Things. But that doesn’t last long. Soon he’s back in Manhattan, reluctantly collecting rent on his father’s seedy properties in sordid Times Square and making his terrified wife’s life increasingly miserable, including demanding she get an abortion because he doesn’t want children and arranging that, if she divorces him, she’ll be penniless. When Katie mysteriously vanishes, things grow more bizarre, as increasingly eccentric David flees to Galveston Texas, where he dons a blonde wig and pretends to be a mute woman, entering into a creepy relationship with an elderly, penniless neighbor, Malvern Bump (Philip Baker Hall), that includes homicide and disposing a dismembered body.
Based on the escapades of real-life Robert Durst, who took a $50+ million payout in exchange for giving up all claims to the rest of his family’s money, it’s a speculative account of how he may have contributed to his wife’s still-inexplicable disappearance in 1982. After success with “Capturing the Friedmans,” Moviefone co-founder Andrew Jarecki and co-writers Marc Smerling and Marcus Hinchey delve into the angst of the Dursts, another New York Jewish family. Problem is: despite the factual evidence, this psychological thriller doesn’t ring true, leaving the audience emotionally detached and disappointed.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “All Good Things” is an ambiguous, ineptly fictionalized 5. It’s too bad Jarecki didn’t turn the unsolved murders into a documentary.
