Good One

Constructed more out of incident and emotion than plot, “Good One” brings to mind Kelly Reichardt’s “Old Joy” (2006) in so much as it is about two lifelong male friends, in this case Chris (James Legros) and Matt (Danny McCarthy), taking a camping trip in the wilderness. The crucial difference, however, is that writer/director India Donaldson’s movie is seen not from their perspective but that of Chris’s queer 17-year-old daughter Sam (Lily Collias) who winds up alone in the company of these two men when Matt’s son backs out at the last minute, resentful over his parents’ divorce. Sam harbors resentments about her own parents’ divorce, it turns out, and, in this case, nature proves not a respite from the larger world but an unmasking of it, opening Sam’s eyes in new and profound ways. She dotes on the men, cooking them dinner, and plays referee to their various spats, and yet, just as often seems to disappear from view, such as in a sequence where they briefly mingle with three other male campers, and in another one when she attends to feminine issues behind a tree trunk while Chris and Matt impatiently wait. 

When Chris cites having children as the last step to emotional maturity sitting next to a daughter who essentially takes care of him the whole trip, Donaldson lets the brutal irony quietly sit there on Sam’s face. And that’s where this movie mostly takes place – on Sam’s face. She is rarely allowed to speak for herself, cut off or ignored when she does, and provided no accompanying voiceover to explicate her thoughts, just occasional texts back home to her girlfriend when she’s in cell range. Indeed, what’s so impressive is that despite Donaldson being a first-time feature director and this being only Collias’s second feature film, they possess an implicit understanding of the actor and camera yoked together, how little both need to do and how that dissolves the barrier between them so that it’s as if her internal monologue is silently beamed straight to us. The men prattle on and on, but Sam doesn’t need to use her words to let us hear everything she thinks.