Review: 'The Good Mother' builds momentum that never lands
"The Good Mother," out in theaters now, is an overblown drug drama that makes its brief running time of one hour and 29 minutes feel like an eternity.
Hilary Swank, a two-time Oscar winner for "Boys Don't Cry" and "Million Dollar Baby," plays Marissa Bennings, a journalist who's been leaning hard on the bottle since the death of her husband and more recently her estranged, junkie son Michael.
At a funeral service, she takes a swing at Michael's pregnant girlfriend Paige (Olivia Cooke), whom Marissa blames for feeding her son's addiction. Later, the two enemies join forces to figure out who is really responsible for Michael's murder.
All signs point to Michael's dealer, Ducky (Hopper Penn, son of Sean Penn and Robin Wright), who fought over a shipment of dirty heroin laced with deadly fentanyl, known on the street as "mother's milk."
There is nothing comforting about any of the characters in "The Good Mother," who seem victimized by the soul sickness of modern times -- an overriding grief that buries itself in substance abuse that turns so-called ordinary people into a zombified army of the living dead.
Set in the dank gray of Albany, New York, where a no-hope aura seeps into every scene, "The Good Mother" is hard put to find the good in anyone, including Marissa's surviving son, Toby (Jack Reynor), an Albany policeman who's showing cracks in his armor of moral rectitude.
Marissa's editor (Norm Lewis) at the Albany Times Union (a real paper which deserved a livelier showcase) tells her she is the best writer on his staff, even though she "barely knows what the internet is." Marissa is mostly shown nursing a bottle instead of nurturing her creativity.
Director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, working from a script he wrote with Madison Harrison, is quick to abandon the thriller aspects of his film -- too entertaining, maybe? -- preferring to muck about in the urban underbelly. When possible, Joris-Peyrafitte -- an Albany native himself -- lets the city that formed him do the talking. Not a bad thing, at least theoretically. Director Terrence Malick has made an art out of eloquent landscapes in such films as "Days of Heaven" and "The Tree of Life." Sadly, Joris-Peyrafitte is a long way from Malick or even visual coherence.
After a promising 2016 Sundance debut with "As You Are," he's drifted deep into artistic pretension, managing to dim the starshine of the luminous Margot Robbie in 2019's Dust Bowl tragedy, "Dreamland."
"The Good Mother" almost builds momentum when Marissa and Paige track Toby on a train ride into the heart of the city and the core of their private hells. But before this lifeless vacuum of a movie squeezes itself into its final predictable corner, audiences will be joining the characters in devoutly wishing for an end to their misery.
