All Good Things (2010)

Chronicles Gosling, son of wealthy New York real estate tycoon Langelia, who is linked to a series of murders. Great performances by all, but Dunst's brilliance brings a suiting yet odd romance to this crime-drama as the central character's wife. Loosely based on the life of accused murderer Robert Durst, but if you caught THE JINX (also by Andrew Jarecki), you'll know that the events are more authentic than most "based on"s. What makes the film so great is that it refuses to structure itself in a conventional manner and allows things to unravel in a very gradual, strange, and realistic manner. Its downfall is too much focus on the early life of Gosling's character, giving it a fatal uneven vibe.*** (out of four)

Andrew Jarecki, director of the acclaimed, ambiguous documentary 'Capturing the Friedmans', returns here to the subject of troubled families, with his account of the life of David Marks. The film must come dangerously close to libel, being based on the real life of Robert Durst, who was twice acquitted of murder (suffice it to say Jarecki does not seem so convinced by his plea of innocence). The film begins by painting a sympathetic portrait, of a man bullied by his tyrannical family, but soon begins showing us a less flattering side. Ulimtatley, the story lacks resolution, and a drama extrapolated from the truth like this is always in danger of falling between two stools: one expects a made-up story to attain different standards to one that is merely representing what happened. There's a high-class cast, but ultimately the film lacks both the cohesion of fiction and the compulsion of truth.

The main actors give great performances but it's unbelievable that their characters are related to each other.The father is not likely to be Gosling's character's father. It just doesn't match.The romance between Dunst and Gosling is not intimate, not sensitive enough. If you have seen some prior work of Gosling, as in Blue Valentine, you know what I mean. And you know what I mean anyway if you ever had a real love story yourself.The sex scene is the worst I have ever seen! I mean, Gosling puts his hand under her dress, but so low that of course he touches nothing, she opens his pants as he waits there, they kiss and we clearly see her mouth with her tongue moving in the space, then they are on the bed : there are no emotions, there is nothing real about it, you almost hear the director give the instructions! Then when they are under the shower, they keep a distance between their bodies. I swear to God, I heard Dunst whisper : look, I'm an actress, this doesn't have to be real, so don't touch me, OK? Plus, even if I love Gosling very much, even if I love to see him naked, I found him to not be the right actor for the shirtless scenes. I mean, come on, he is musclebound, which doesn't make it plausible for him to be a weak, freaky man, jealous of his wife.So I found the casting to be very very bad. Casting being the art of putting together the actors in a way that will make the whole work.Now, every performance respectively was astounding.About the scenario, there are also some weaknesses : it is hard to understand why a woman would endure for so long such a hard relationship. There are not much clues. It is bizarre why she comes back at the end to that freak. And when she finds the blood of the dog, what she does? She goes show him! And that's the same woman that went through the window to save herself from him when he hit her???? Come on! The movie tends to make us see that woman only as a victim, almost a moron! And that doesn't seem fair to me. If she wanted, she could have gone back to where she came from and begin her life again, couldn't she? So I assume she got used to money. Or was she that in love? Well, it is a mystery anyway, love...Also, I've read in some review that Gosling's character tries to look normal until he can't hide his craziness anymore. I haven't seen that. He just switches from sane to insane. I thought he was normal in the beginning! A bit weird, but just like I am ;), not a psycho! Now the story itself is very interesting, very touching, and very creepy. If it can help only one woman to run away from a psycho, even if she has no penny, then it would have been useful.It is absolutely non-understandable though that the real person has not been pursued for the murder of his wife, especially since he has been able to kill someone later on, and to cut that someone into pieces! I mean, come on! And the funny thing is that he had only 9 months of jail for improper disposal of a body! What? Seriously? How does anyone want people to stop killing people if the justice is so light? Anyway, if you're a fan of Ryan Gosling, I recommend that movie! If you're a fan of Ryan Gosling, I recommend any movie he's in! :)

'All Good Things' is the only big screen feature film made until now by director Andrew Jarecki, who seems to have been involved previously with documentary movies, and we can feel this. Although he had for this movie at hands a splendid team of Hollywood actors who did a fine job he did not succeed to turn the juicy crime story upon which the film is based into a real compelling piece of cinema.The story Jarecki is using is the highly publicized and never solved case of the disappearance in the early 80s of the wife of a rich class New Yorker, involved in the murky real-estate business of his family in the center of Manhattan. Twenty years and two more bodies later he was brought in Court, but his guilt was never proved and today he walks free. However the film does not focus on the investigation, but rather provides a convincing (on screen) theory of the way things happen, of the motivation and reasons of the crimes. It's a dark story about moral misery and personal crisis in a family of super-riches. The problem is that it's hard to define and possibly the distributors had a hard time advertising the genre and the story of the film. Crime stories fans will find themselves watching for more than half of the screening time a family drama, romance (the film starts like kind of a 'Love Story') quickly turns into disarray and domestic violence, reality does not necessarily make into cinematographic truth.The best reasons to watch this film despite mixed reviews and not a very high mark on IMDb is however acting. Ryan Gosling can hardly do wrong on my taste, and here he is facing a complex role, in which he accompanies his deeply troubled hero from young age to late maturity, from the picks of the easy life of the New York socialites to the abyss of the life of a fugitive and transvestite. The even better news is that there is even better acting than Gosling's in this film and I refer of course to Kirsten Dunst's role as the loving wife whose dream of marrying the nice and rich guy slowly descends into nightmare, and to the veteran Frank Langella who injects character and complexity in the role of the family father who is much more than a (anti)-moral symbol. At the end of the day and of the film the artistic truth of this story comes from a different place than the factual truth.