An exceptional first feature about a daughter, a father and casual remarks that can linger for a lifetime, writer-director India Donaldson’s feature debut “Good One” plays like a near-perfect short story or novella, handled just so. Donaldson shot it in 12 days. You have just a few days to catch the Chicago premiere at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
In the opening minutes, high school senior Sam, played by the quietly phenomenal newcomer Lily Collias, is at home in her bedroom, somewhere in New York City, talking, laughing, texting with her friend and maybe-lover Jessie (Sumaya Bouhbal). Sam’s about to leave on her annual Catskills hiking excursion with her tightly wound father, Chris, played by James Le Gros.
Early the next morning, father and daughter pick up Chris’ longtime actor friend, Matt (longtime Chicago stage veteran Danny McCarthy) and Matt’s son, still reeling from his parents’ recent breakup. Sam knows how that goes; this is her dad’s second marriage. Then, we see and sort-of hear what Sam sees from the back seat, looking outside: a few rough seconds of a father/son argument, followed by stone-quiet Matt getting in the car, alone.
“Good One” doesn’t have a lot of overt narrative to its narrative, which is fine (ideal, in fact) because not much is necessary. It’s a film sustained by its three main characters: what they say, how they say it and when they don’t say anything. Without Matt’s son along for the trip, Sam feels a little awkward — confined to the role of observer — by the adult men in the car, and then on the trail. The picture shifts from low-key human comedy to a more interior sort of drama as it progresses across 80 or so minutes.
Sam learns many things, often wordlessly, as she plays cards outside her tent with her father and Matt and the young men from the neighboring campsite. Later, she listens intently but warily as her dad and his friend drink too much by the campfire, and spill some half-revealing, half-concealing stories of past regrets. Sam assumes the role, and likely not for the first time in her life, of pent-up-emotion traffic controller, the way so many adolescents in so many complicated, uneasy families do.
The coming-attractions trailer for “Good One” plays fast and loose with the actual movie, to the point of being stupidly deceptive. There is tension here, yes, and some conflict, yes. But without giving anything away (it’s not a “big reveal” film, though, to be clear) the linchpin scene leads somewhere other than fireworks, or anguished speeches. Donaldson’s compelled by the opposite: something unspoken, to borrow a phrase from Tennessee Williams, or words and feelings badly, dangerously expressed, leading to a sobering realization for Sam. And then one more.
The camera stays very close to Collias throughout and she responds with wonderful ease. Le Gros and McCarthy tackle the intricacies of a long, often needling sort of male friendship. Their roles demand rigorously naturalistic behavior, which actors typically avoid out of fear of being dull, or not enough. Director Donaldson and her cinematographer Wilson Cameron, also making his feature debut, soak up the natural world, from slugs on a rock to thickets of mountain greenery. More than once, we see Sam disassembling the tent’s multi-part aluminum rods, handling them like Tinkertoys. It’s a wonderfully offhanded metaphor, if you want to see it that way. Is this what adolescent girls must do? Learn to assemble and take apart the perplexing components of the adult men in their lives?
Donaldson is the daughter of veteran Australian director Roger Donaldson (“No Way Out,” “Cocktail”), which by the most dismissive definition makes her a nepo baby. I’d say it doesn’t apply here, certainly not in terms of results and verifiable, often beautiful promise. Despite a few lines of dialogue veering into on-the-nose territory, at its best “Good One” catches fragments of a lifetime in a sentence or two. At one point Le Gros’ Chris, who needs alcohol to even begin unpacking his heavier baggage, responds to Matt’s shared campfire story — the story that led to his divorce, and to cold war with a teenaged son adrift.
“You do the bad thing,” Chris says, responding in a fog of his own memories, and it’ll haunt you for years until (he says) one day you realize: “Oh. I only thought about the bad thing once today.”
“Good One” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for language)
Running time: 1:29
How to watch: Aug. 23-29 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; siskelfilmcenter.org
Phillips is a Tribune critic.
