Story of grief and friendship has heart as well as cliches
The dead-lover grief drama is common enough, with a handful of iterations released every year, to qualify for its own movie genre. And understandably so: The notion of a partner gone too soon (they’re almost always about a young marriage shattered by sudden tragedy) is its own dramatic narrative before one even gets to the details.
Of course, when you have a genre full of those stories, that inevitably means familiar cliches and too-pat arcs. “Good Grief ” has, on the surface, the trappings of a predictable commercial grief movie — even its perhaps toopunchy title is enough to signal that.
There’s the glittering, happy life it opens on, a posh London holiday party, before things are interrupted by a sudden accident that kills Oliver (Luke Evans), the husband of the protagonist, Marc (Dan Levy). There’s the chaotic, party-hard friend and the other reserved one who help nurse Marc back to life. Then, finally, the twist.
And yet for all its earnestness and relatively bythe-book approach, the film manages to often skirt around cheap drama or cloyingly feel-good tropes. It’s a clean and confident directorial debut from the “Schitt’s Creek” star, who also wrote the screenplay and does a serviceable job as the central widower.
Then again, what enriches and elevates the film is its expanded perspective. Yes, “Good Grief ” is about grief, but it’s perhaps more so about friendship and how you fail one another when you’re still struggling to figure things out.
After Marc loses his husband, a highly successful author, his two best friends, Sophie (Ruth Negga) and Thomas (Himesh Patel), are by his side. Thomas even moves in with him, while Sophie pushes him onto a dating app.
But they have their problems too. And Marc doesn’t tell them about a recent revelation about Oliver that is underpinning the trip to Paris he’s taking them on as they near the one-year anniversary of Oliver’s death. Nevertheless, off they go gallivanting around France.
Together, the three work together rather well, a surprise less from the already proven Negga (“Passing” and the AMC series “Preacher”) and Patel (“Yesterday,” “Tenet”) but more from Levy, who proves he can act beyond that air of exasperated bafflement that nearly became his shtick following the success of his sitcom “Schitt’s Creek.”
While not offering anything particularly surprising or challenging in its take on the unpredictable shadow of loss, “Good Grief” delivers plenty of heart.
For all its earnestness and relatively by-the-book approach, the film manages to often skirt around cheap drama or cloyingly feel-good tropes.