All Good Things is the type of film that bugs me the most. It features all the qualities necessary to make an oustanding picture: a talented, bright young cast; an eye catching true story of one of this country's most notorious missing person's cases; and an accomplished director with an insightful eye who specializes in just this type of material. Yet none of those pieces come together to make a satisying whole. A highly fictionalized account of the sordid life of Robert Durst, renamed David Marks(Ryan Gosling) for the film, and the 30 year mystery surrounding the sudden disappearance of his wife, Kathleen McCormack, renamed Katie McCarthy(Kirsten Dunst). The true story is a twisted journey social status, legal injustice, blackmail, and murder. The movie adequately portrays two of these things, but leaves way too much of the story on the cutting room floor.
David Marks was the son of a wealthy real estate magnate(Frank Langella) and part of the upper crust of New York society. Groomed to be an integral part of the family business, David never had the disposition to be a part of the social order. He wasn't exactly good with people, and never all that comfortable with his money and familial influence. David liked that his new, vivacious girlfriend Katie was a regular person. She wasn't impressed by his wealth, and her presence was enough to light up a room. Her smile was infectious and everybody liked her.
David and Katie struck out on their own, escaping the city life for a whole new beginning in the Vermont countryside. It doesn't last long, as good ol' dad convinces David to take on the family trade. This doesn't sit well with Katie, who begins building a life for herself by applying to medical school. David, perhaps unsettled in his own life, begins a rapid transformation. Where there was once a lovable, somewhat peculiar fellow now stands a cruel, heartless man with an anger pointed square at the woman he claims to love. Their fights intensify, the couple separates, but then one day Katie simply vanishes into thin air.
With the aid of his longtime best friend, Deborah Lehrman(the amazing Lily Rabe), David hightails it to Texas where an already strange situation gets downright weird. I'm talkin' cross dressing weird. I'm talkin' hetero lifemate with a grizzled old neighbor weird. The bodies start to pile up all around David's life,injustices of an imbalanced legal system always seem to tilt in his favor.
All Good Things marks the feature film debut of Andrew Jarecki, who burst onto the scene a few years ago with his documentary,
Capturing the Friedmans. That film also focused on a well to-do family buried under a ton of secrets that threatened to ruin them all. Maybe Jarecki's calling is as a documentarian, where the truth is right there to be presented and never embellished. One of the many problems I have with All Good Things is that even though many of the details are in fact true, they are presented in a ridiculous fashion that makes them nearly impossible to believe. In particular David's stint dressing up as a mute woman is almost presented as dark comedy, like the Odd Couple caught in a murder mystery. The real life story starts in the 1970s and in a lot of ways is still going on today(there've been some fairly recent developments), and it's clear that there was a struggle deciding what needed to be shown and what could be left out.
What does work, however, is the performance by Kirsten Dunst. Rarely has she been given a chance to play a real role as an adult. She's been making some heavy film choices lately(she'll be in Lars Von Trier's next film for starters), but she still maintains her youthful looks and exuberance. It's absolutely essential that we fall in love with her character, known in real life to have been a beloved woman. Dunst is fantastic, and I look forward to seeing where her career goes from here. Gosling has been in a slump of late, but he appears to be getting on the right track. The problems I have with his performance as David Marks have more to do with the inadequacy of the script, which never delves deep enough into his transformation from loving husband to possible psycho.
A disappointing film like this makes me wonder how good it could be if Jarecki had maybe just turned it into a documentary? But then we'd be missing out on arguably Kirsten Dunst's best role in years, and that would be a shame.
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