I’m going to come clean with my bias towards Ryan Gosling. I’ve been down with this kid since he was Young Hercules back in the day. I saw The Notebook twice in theaters and cried both times. Gosling put both Half Nelson and Lars and the Real Girl on his back. He is definitely a franchise player. His choices in roles are always interesting.
Anyway what I’m trying to say is I love me some Ryan Gosling. I took my girlfriend to see All Good Things last Thursday and we were both excited.
Too bad the movie was garbage. It really seemed unnecessary. I’ll give you the synopsis.
This is based on true events.
Gosling is Robert Durst, a rich prince in a New York City real estate empire. He meets and falls for Kathie, played by Kirsten Dunst. Behind the veil of luxury in their marriage, there are drugs and violent episodes. Kathie goes missing in the 1980’s and is never found.
See, this is a Dateline episode. You already know the husband killed his wife. Why did the producer feel the need to dramatize this into a full 90 minute feature? It certainly wasn’t for the sake of thought-provoking character development.
One minute Robert is charming in a dripping wet tuxedo or at his health foods store in Vermont, the next he is killing dogs and dressing in drag. The jumps seemed too far-fetched to me. Anyway why should we care? Dunst is effective enough as Kathie, but the script doesn’t give her much to do but look anxious. Gosling is wasted on this story.
He is also made to look ridiculous in horrible make-up in order for him to play Robert in old age. This is a lame technique Hollywood uses that always fails. I say cast older actors to play older characters. I really didn’t need to see Gosling in a whack wig piece and dress ensemble either.
In the end, All Good Things gets a D+. The story was really weak and would have worked better as a documentary with real people commentating, experts on the case, documents, photography and audio. Gosling was conned into doing this. Check him out in Blue Valentine he was better there.
Ryan get back in the lab and show these people what’s up.
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