Sam (Lily Collias) is living her final summer at home before leaving for college. Her dad Chris (James Le Gros) takes her backpacking in the Catskills, along with his friend Matt (Danny McCarthy). The set-up is intentionally simple since the complexities grow inward from there. I won’t describe the interpersonal dynamics of this trio, although of course it’s tempting to do so. All of that is best left to simply watching the film. I can comment, however, on a number of decisions and aspects that make the movie distinctive, and that earn it a place among this year’s best films.
Early in the movie, for instance, after they’ve set up camp, they encounter three younger guys who are experienced hikers. The two trios of characters hang out and talk together, prepare a meal side by side, and plan a tentative hiking trip to China together for the following year. It’s clear that the younger trio of guys, more sensitive to each other and to contemporary ways, is intended to contrast with the slightly older male characters Chris and Matt, who can be a bit abrasive, corny, and dismissive of Sam on more than one occasion. As an extension of that contrast, Good One does suffer a bit from what I’d call Thelma & Louise Syndrome, allowing the middle-aged male characters to border a bit too much on cariacature at times. Chris is a developer/contractor, and Matt has had a career as a successful television actor, so in actual life, they’d obviously be a little more sensitive and not quite as stupid (to be blunt) as the film portrays them.
The actors rescue the movie from being derailed by that. Expert at lending their dialogue and expressions layers of close-up nuance, Le Gros and especially McCarthy diversify what could otherwise be a monochromatic pair of performances. The light sparring that they engage in with Sam throughout the movie is innocuous enough, until late in the film when it quite suddenly isn’t. How the film pivots based on a single line of dialogue has been critically misconstrued in my view, and the movie itself is invested in exploring why that is. I won’t reveal what exactly gets said (and by whom & to whom), though you can just google that easily enough if you want.
Lily Collias gives the year’s best performance by any actor in her age bracket. We are with her every step of the way, in terms of what its like to feel like a young woman at her age, one who has to contend both with men and with her female friends (as well as her period, which descends on her just as the trio are getting packed to depart for their weekend camping trip). How she expediently yet patiently deals with things like being somewhat sidelined and controlled, mansplaining, and being forced into something of a caretaker or “emotionally available” role for the duration of the movie coaxes the viewer into trusting her point of view despite our initial hesitancy to do so because she’s someone who’s very much still in the process of growing. Everything that Collias reveals through her portrayal of Sam is measured, exact, and natural in ways that allow anyone, not just young women, to relate to her character and what she endures.
Schwartzman and Cane share the most powerful scene between two actors from any film in 2024. As Ben and Carla are getting to re-know each other through their initial discussions of Carla’s later-years bat mitzvah, Carla tells Ben in painful detail the story of why she never had a bat mitzvah when she was thirteen. Then, she makes Ben repeat the entire story back to her verbatim, using “I” instead of “you,” so that he’s reiterating Carla’s own story in the first-person voice. The effect is profound, an authentic encapsulation of the spiritual notion that “you are everything, and everything is you.” We see this depth of empathy clearly in the two actors’ eyes, and Silver’s camera abundantly captures it. After Ben finishes repeating Carla’s story back to her, she simply looks at him and says, “You got it, Benny.”
Midway through the movie, there’s a hilarious scene at a restaurant called The Chained Duck, in which the characters hold menus the size of a folded map of the world, certainly the most oversized prop menus ever devised for any film. Their dinner out is Ben’s re-introduction to Carla’s son, who went to grade school with Ben but doesn’t remember him. Another riotous dinner scene a bit later in the movie very directly invokes John Cassavetes’ films, both in its grainy close-up visual style and its chaotic capturing of the characters’ seemingly semi-impromptu dialogue. Robert Smigel (who voiced Triumph the Insult Comic Dog on Conan O’Brien’s late-night talk show) as Ben’s rabbi, and Dolly De Leon (from Triangle of Sadness) as Ben’s mother-in-law, both add comic relief with their swerves of trenchant humor and swiftly timed curveballs throughout that sequence.
The film’s ending, however, is what makes it truly special and worth sitting through its entire two-hour running time. What if your temple is a rolling hillside out beyond your rural-suburban backyard? What if your temple is the world?
This is the final post of popsublime, my blog of over fourteen years now. I will close it with the final poem from my fifth and final book of poetry:
PROVIDENCE HIGHWAY
Between midday cinema screenings
at Legacy Place and Dedham Square,
I walk a mile of Providence Highway
beside four lanes packed with cars
under heat of summertime sunshine
intensified by an even greater heat
radiating from the metallic traffic
continually churning past me
as I thread my way past parking lots,
shattered debris of old asphalt,
blank storefronts staring forlornly,
taking me back to Colerain Avenue
in Cincinnati where I walked alone
in second grade to see a matinee
of “Annie” at Northgate Mall Cinema
and paid for it myself with a tiny bag
of 200 pennies I had collected.
In this country you can opt out
of capitalism just once in youth
and after that last chance to get out
you’re subsumed into the system
forever, even if you think otherwise.
The cars, the heat, blazing currents:
you know how the world will end,
or at least human life, which means
for us the world. I will no longer give
this world what it doesn’t deserve.
— Jason Roush
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