The dark side
‘The Good Mother’ a stellar, gritty crime thriller
The best and certainly darkest crime thriller currently out there is something called, of all things, “The Good Mother.” Two-time Academy Award-winner Hilary Swank, who also produced, leads as Marissa Bennings, an editor at the Albany, N.Y.’s Times Union newspaper with a serious drinking problem. Who can blame her? Her husband has recently died, something she has mixed feelings about, and one of her two sons Mike, an on-andoff drug addict since he injured his arm playing baseball, turns up dead after being shot by a guy in a white truck with a tattooed hand.
At Mike’s graveside, Marissa slugs Mike’s pregnant girlfriend Paige (Englishwoman Olivia Cooke, who also produced) for participating in her son’s drug addiction, one assumes. Paige, who is sober, and Marissa, who is chronically drunk, then form the most unlikely team of detectives.
They are on the trail of Ducky (Hopper Penn, son of Sean Penn), the friend and drug dealer who worked with Mike and knows what happened. Marissa’s “good son” Toby ( Jack Reynor, “Midsommar”), who is married to Gina (Dilone) — they’re trying to get pregnant — is an Albany police officer also involved in tracking Ducky down, in particular to find out what happened to $100,000 worth of deadly “dirty heroin” laced with fentanyl. It turns out that an old man (Cliff Ware), whose memory is not so good, saw what happened to Mike from his front window.
Directed by Miles JorisPeyrafitte, who co-wrote the screenplay with writing partner Madison Harrison, who also appears as Mike, “The Good Mother” is going to remind some of an Albany-based version of the crime dramas of Dorchester’s great Dennis Lehane (Mystic River,” “Gone Baby Gone”). Almost everyone in the film is dirty or damaged or both. Marissa’s editor-in-chief moans about the “sea change” newspapers are going through, so I’m guessing the film is set in the early aughts. Paige confesses to having pregnant cravings for PlayDoh. Marissa suggests she clear that with her doctor. Paige doesn’t have a doctor. Grieving grandmother-tobe Marissa takes Paige to see one.
Cooke, who bears a distinct resemblance to Florence Pugh, is equally magnetic on screen. Paige goes with Marissa to an AA meeting. These two are certainly an odd couple. I wish Joris-Peyrafitte, who is currently developing a new version of the 1995 cult fave “Tank Girl,” had done even more with this. Swank and Cooke turn up the gloom, and the action mirrors them. Cinematographer Charlotte Hornsby (“Hair Wolf”), shooting on location in Albany, gives us a long look at the railway yards, patterned pavements and the windowless, brutalist oddity The Egg, which resembles a moored UFO.
The drama is brutalist, too. A woman (Karen Aldridge) at the AA meeting speaks of finding her daughter dead of a drug overdose in her room. “Suddenly, we were one of ‘those’ families.” What Marissa
and Paige uncover is the darkling path that got us to where we are. Is that a suicide or a murder? Does it even matter? A swinging cinder block beats against a tenement wall, tolling some to their deaths. The twists get darker, and soon we can hardly see. Do you think this ends with the death or capture of the man in the white truck with the tattooed hand? Closure is gone, baby, gone.
(“The Good Mother” contains profanity, violence and drug use)