The Good Half is the type of movie a person my age and with my pop-cultural tastes is predisposed to love, if not, simply appreciate (admittedly, for some surface-level reasons).
Premiering at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, the family dramedy’s director is Robert Schwartzman—one of my first cinematic crushes, for his role as introverted love interest Michael Moscovitz in The Princess Diaries. Later, in 2008, his band Rooney’s debut album Calling The World became a staple on my iPod. (My later discovery that he is a member of the Coppola dynasty earned him extra cool points.)
On top of that, The Good Half ’s leading man is none other than Nick Jonas, another childhood crush—more accurately, idol—whose acting opportunities have mostly been limited to Disney Channel fare, wherein he’s played several versions of himself. (His biggest role since was in a DirecTV show about MMA fighting that, to all intents and purposes, simply does not exist.)
Even with a plot that sounded akin to famously bad movies about spiraling men and their Manic Pixie Dream Girls (Garden State, Elizabethtown), the prospect of The Good Half at least being somewhat, well, good still fueled me with excitement. So imagine my utter disappointment when I discovered that there’s literally nothing salvageable or remotely moving about this film. From its formulaic plot to its mechanical dialogue and one-dimensional characters, The Good Half is as generic and uncurious as a movie about grief and masculinity can get.
I wish I could say that The Good Half felt promising or worthy of my initial interest at some point. But the film exposes its cracks right out of the gate (mainly courtesy of its charmless screenplay by Brett Ryland) and continues to double-down on its worst instincts over the course of 100 minutes.
The first sign of trouble is in an early scene, where the film’s writer protagonist Renn (Jonas) meets a therapist named Zoey (Alexandra Shipp) on a flight from Los Angeles to Cleveland, where Renn’s headed for his mother Lily’s (Elizabeth Shue) funeral. Their meet cute is glaringly abrupt and lacking any sort of grace. It’s almost as if someone, speaking to Shipp through an earpiece, orders her to turn to her left and start randomly pestering Jonas’ character for no reason at all. (Her pickup line is to ask him what’s outside his window… on a plane?)
Watching them joke back-and-forth—although the actual humor was lost on me and, seemingly, my silent fellow audience members—feels like watching what I can only describe as an AI trying to mimic a Nora Ephorn script. The confidence with which these characters deliver this flirty and unfathomable dialogue is even more cringey.
Ironically enough, Renn’s father Darren (Matt Walsh) says something in a subsequent scene that echoes the movie’s issues in this respect. When Darren runs into Renn for the first time since he’s landed in Cleveland, he can only speak to his son in meaningless clichés about grief. He then admits that he’s not sure how to comfort his family without sounding like a “Google Search of how to console someone.” In a similar way, all the interactions in this movie feel derived from conversations previously had in cinema and television rather than real, human experiences.
After Renn’s first encounter with Zoey, she vanishes for much of the film, except to act as an occasional sounding board for his barely articulated problems. As thankless as her role is, she can barely be described as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, because she hardly has any real effect on Renn’s arc. Most of the film finds him arranging Lily’s funeral alongside his desperate-to-connect father, his high-strung sister Leigh (Brittany Snow), and his sketchy former stepfather Rick (David Arquette). As soon as we catch a glimpse of Renn’s dismissive attitude throughout the planning process, it’s clear a breakdown is on the horizon.
The root of Renn’s unhappiness throughout the film is pretty obvious. But his sardonic and petulant attitude toward the people surrounding him is a bit perplexing. In general, Renn thinks he’s better than the occupants of his Midwestern hometown. He also scoffs at all the planning processes for memorializing his mother, as if these harmless rituals are a major affront to her. (He does reasonably question why they’re recruiting a Catholic priest when she was Jewish, however.)
For the most part, though, Renn’s anger is unreasonably misaimed, even for someone in the throes of grief. For instance, when he and Leigh meet the priest to help write their eulogies, Renn gets upset when the priest inquires about his mother’s hobbies and interests, stating that she would’ve resented this process. “She hated people and talking,” he snaps back, although the flashbacks of her say otherwise.
This leads to another glaring problem with the film: It renders Lily’s character, as well as her relationship to Renn, as completely uncomplicated. Via flashbacks, the film paints a portrait of her as a kind, outgoing woman, with a slightly rebellious spirit. There’s a running bit about her stealing spoons from restaurants, to demonstrate that she was a “naughty,” “unconventional” mom. Other than that, none of Renn’s memories of Lily adds any complexity to his grief, beyond the obvious devastation of losing a parent.
However, we eventually learn (a little too late) that Leigh’s relationship with her mother was somewhat fraught. Toward the end of the film, she tells Renn that he was the favorite and that she wished their mother took her on the same adventures as she went on with him. Unfortunately, the film isn’t curious about her emotional state prior to that point. Given this extra layer—plus Snow’s impressive performance, despite the movie’s flaws—it seems like the story should’ve focused on Leigh.
By the time Renn is ready to unload his grief onto Zoey and various funeral guests, his reaction doesn’t pay off. Despite his attempts to appear stoic leading up to his mother’s burial, it’s apparent that the young man is struggling to acknowledge his mother’s passing. Ultimately, that’s the only revelation The Good Half can build up to: An angry man is actually just sad. Who’d’ve thought??
Ultimately, the film’s stacked cast is the only thing it really has going for it. But even their performances are inhibited by a soulless script. Jonas especially struggles to present any layers or idiocracies to his character beyond “generic LA jerk.” Likewise, Schwartzman’s direction is that of a punchy, straightforward comedy, which the script never really rises to, despite its multiple attempts. Additionally, some editing choices and music cues feel extremely amateurish for a director making his fourth feature.
Despite my efforts to dig for nuance or appreciate the convention of this overdone tale, The Good Half is wholly and irredeemably bad.
