The psychoanalytic term of the “big Other” is a fancy shorthand for our symbolic social order, and it’s what delimits most of our everyday lives among others. This big Other forms the bedrock of our morality, institutes our shared norms, and hovers like a specter over the urge to transgress. But what happens when its nakedness is revealed? In Oedipal dynamics, the child whose father appears immortal learns inevitably of his impotence, and is traumatized by it, going so far as to enact a parricidal desire in order to preserve the fiction of symbolic authority. Growing up, a process increasingly outsourced to smartphones and external media, likewise precipitates — and speeds up — adolescent rejection of adult dogma couched as wisdom. It’s a momentous occasion sometimes defined by singular events, and at other times a gestating ebb of confidence in the master figure standing between the sanctity of childhood and the cruel indifference of the wider world.
In Good One, India Donaldson’s shrewdly perceptive first feature, such an occasion is brought to a literal cusp over the course of a weekend hiking trip in the Catskills. Sam (Lily Collias) and Chris (James Le Gros), a daughter-father duo, are to journey with Chris’ longtime friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) and his son Dylan (Julien Grady), but after the latter pulls out, Matt appears poised to be the unwieldy third wheel to Sam’s coming-of-age: she’s 17, headed for college in the fall, and something about this trip suggests it may be the last in a long time. But different dynamics are in place even before the trio make their way up New York state. Sam’s relegated to the back of the car at her father’s somewhat exasperated behest, and Matt, taking her spot, attempts to inject life into a friendship which has weathered the test of time but lost most of its charm. Matt, disheveled from burdensome fatherhood and a failed career as an actor, waxes lyrical about philosophy and drops trivia tidbits on the forest floor; Chris, more put-together although himself divorced from Sam’s mother, says little and frequently responds with thinly concealed contempt.
Over the course of Good One, the two fathers do most of the talking, stopping only to seek pat assurances from Sam and condescend to her precocious wisdom. Yet it’s Sam whose perspective imbues their middle-aged anxiety with pathetic clarity and to whose thoughts we are most privy. No longer a mere child under lock-and-key guardianship and neither fully independent from the obligations of family and deference, she enters and inhabits a space where cantankerous masculinity gradually takes root and unveils its self-obsessions. Offhand remarks linger on not just as slips of tongue, but as preconceived notions both descriptive and prescriptive; early on, Matt wrongly sizes up Sam as a vegetarian (“you look like one”) and enquires about her girlfriend, Jessie (Sumaya Bouhbal), with some snark. One might be forgiven for expecting a tirade against woke culture, but he only seems to segue into indirect self-pity: “boys are fucked up. You should see Dylan’s browser history.”
Good One proves disarming in part because of these quiet antagonisms. One isn’t even sure if they are overt, as if the skirmish between generations were tacitly overlaid onto a battle of the sexes and fashioned into wilful ritual humiliation. The likely reason is more subtle and perhaps sadder: its erstwhile father figures have all but relinquished their own sense of legitimacy and, thus bereft, mine campfire stories and convivial signifiers for comfort. Though they do so at the expense of the girl whose adolescence teeters into adulthood — furtive periods, uncomfortable silences, lost weekends with friends — they do not carry quite as much weight. Amid the lush, verdant canopies and snaking streams, Sam finds her way out of the illusory safety established by the adults and charts her own path forward, carrying a conviction that only she, and not her weak and timorous dad, walks that path. The pleasures of Good One, then, lie precisely in its fulgent images, through which the natural and uncharted worlds dispense with stultifying habit and become one.
DIRECTOR: India Donaldson; CAST: Lily Collias, James Le Gros, Danny McCarthy, Sumaya Bouhbal; DISTRIBUTOR: Metrograph Pictures; IN THEATERS: August 9; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 30 min.
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