All Good Things

All Good Things, a film by Andrew Jarecki, released in 2010 after much delay, is confounding. It's well made and quite involving, but at some point near the end I realized it had nowhere to go. It's based on an actual disappearance and murder case and makes suppositions, but the film just peters out and leaves the viewer unsatisfied.

Ryan Gosling stars as the son of a real estate mogul who is pretty much a slacker. He meets a middle-class woman from Long Island (Kirsten Dunst) and they get married, despite him being from a rich family. He has an overbearing father (Frank Langella) who is kind of against the marriage, even though he likes Dunst personally. He says of her, "She'll never be one of us," to which Gosling replies, "Isn't it great?

The two try to make a go running a health food store in Vermont (the name of the store is the title of the film) but Langella pressures Gosling to join the family business, which just happens to own half of Times Square (he starts by collecting rent from dubious hotels and other shady businesses). His mental health, which never appeared to be at full strength, goes south. He is violent with Dunst, who tries to leave but is told that she will be cut off financially if she does, and she wants to go to medical school. Then she disappears.

This is all told in flashback as Gosling is testifying in court for another crime. He has escaped his family's clutches and is living as a woman in Galveston, Texas. He befriends his elderly neighbor (Philip Baker Hall) to tie up some loose ends with Dunst's disappearance. But Hall ends up in pieces in Galveston Bay, and Gosling is on trial.

All of this sounds pretty good, but there's no real payoff. Since the case is true, and the Gosling character was never implicated in his wife's disappearance, the filmmakers have to make suppositions, which seem half-hearted. And Gosling's character is such an empty hole that it's difficult to make heads or tails of him, or why Dunst is in love with him. Dunst, an actress I'm coming to admire more and more, and should be an A-list star, is given a thankless role to play, but still hits it out of the park.

In some ways this film reminded me of David Fincher's Zodiac, another film based on unsolved crimes. It's all good until the end, when we don't learn anything we couldn't have learned from newspaper accounts.