Good One beautifully captures the quiet shift into womanhood

TThere are days when the maxim “No good deed goes unpunished” seems unbearably heavy, when having done the right thing, the good thing, becomes a burden that you wish you could lift. Writer-director India Donaldson’s beautiful, subtle debut Good it’s about one of those days, specifically the kind of moment that makes you want to go back in time, just a minute, and rearrange the entire scene. It’s about the way humans, blinded by their own neediness, can take advantage of others’ kindness and empathy, even without meaning to. And it’s also about being a child, a teenager who may still be discovering the world, but who has common sense and compassion on her side. The film doesn’t repress any of these ideas; instead, they are like shiny little fish slipping and darting just below the water’s surface. This is a small, delicate film, but its ripples persist.

Seventeen-year-old Sam (Lily Collias) is going on a weekend camping trip to the Catskills with her father, Chris (James Le Gros), who has been divorced from Sam’s mother for some time. Chris’s oldest friend Matt (Danny McCarthy), a boisterous, underemployed actor who is still recovering from a recent divorce, goes with them – his teenage son was supposed to come but backed out at the last minute. Lily seems a little miffed about being stuck with these two old men for the weekend; Before heading too far into the desert, while still able to get signal, she checks her phone and gets an update about a party she’s missing. But she likes Matt, as annoying as he can be, and she’s gone on so many walks with her father that they’ve become a well-worn tradition. She also seems to know, without articulating it to herself, that the era of these father-daughter trips is nearing its end. She’s going to college soon and we know-even if she doesn’t know-how much her life will probably change.

Chris is an experienced hiker and an affable know-it-all. Sam doesn’t even need to roll his eyes at him; His affectionate exasperation is implied. Matt is the kind of guy who fills his backpack with junk food and enough cups and plates to accommodate 20 campers. He brought extra jeans because he can’t imagine wearing the same pair for three days. And, to Chris and Sam’s dismay, he forgot his sleeping bag. But they shouldn’t worry about him getting cold at night – he brought a hat! Matt is a bit of a mess, but at least he’s endearing. Chris teases him relentlessly, but over the decades his idiosyncrasies have become a kind of superglue; they are stuck with each other forever.

Sam intuitively understands this, and although she teases her somewhat heartless father about being an old man who just had a child with his new partner, she is also in tune with what makes these two men feel so sad and lost. . She takes good care of them on the trail, filtering drinking water for them and preparing a meal of pasta that they devour with gusto. (“You guys are like little monsters,” she says as they drink.) She listens sympathetically as, drunk in front of the campfire, Matt prattles on about what a bore her life has become. She is picking up the very vibrations of his sadness. You can see it at the height of your eyebrows – they are like antennas prepared to respond to the emotions of those around you, even those of exasperating old people.

Read more: The 100 best films of the last 10 decades

And then everything changes, in an instant of time that cannot be rewinded. Filmed by Wilson Cameron, Good transports us in waves of visual tranquility. We see wind-tossed trees and an orange traffic-cone salamander gliding across the surface of a rock. Sam spots a slug making its way through a bed of damp leaves and shows it to his father – even these disgusting creatures can seem like miniature miracles. But the film’s turning point makes all these wonders seem sad in retrospect. Nature may not let us down, but boy, people sure can.

You can’t make a movie as low-key as this without good actors, and Donaldson brought together three of them. McCarthy’s Matt is such a clueless chatterbox that sometimes you want to hit him. But when he explains how a new moon can reflect sunlight back to Earth as if returning a blessing, a phenomenon known as earthshine, you can hardly hate him. McCarthy shows us the tenderness behind Matt’s braggadocio. Le Gros, always a fantastic actor, plays Chris as one of those semi-self-absorbed parents who know their daughter is so well-adjusted that they don’t need to worry about her, not realizing that being good parents is less about worry than with truly seeing and hearing the young human being before you.

But Collias is the brightest presence in this triangular constellation. She says a lot, but does very little. At one point, a trio of good-natured twenty-something slackers set up camp about 10 meters away from their small crew. Sam is irritated at first, but then we see how her face opens up in the presence of his affable conversation. They are very goofy, but they have youth on their side, while Sam is stuck spending an entire weekend with a couple of almost 60 guys complaining. She is at the beginning of it all – more than once we see her duck behind a tree to change her tampon, testament to the reality that she is a young, vital person, fully capable of giving life. Meanwhile, the two clueless veterans in his orbit talk about their man problems. Collias captures something subtle here, a quiet shift into adult femininity that happens, literally, overnight. She is the new moon, ready to rise. But, unlike the moon, it produces its own light.