52 Films by Women Vol 8. 52. Good One (Director: India Donaldson)

Pictured: 'Let's just have a good time.' Chris (James Le Gros, left) and teenage daughter Sam (Lily Collias) in a scene from writer-director India Donaldson's 'the hiking trip where everything changed' drama, 'Good One'. Still courtesy of Metrograph Pictures (US)

Good One, the feature debut of writer-director India Donaldson, is a deeply textured, seemingly low-stakes drama about being the child of divorced parents. Donaldson’s father, New Zealand-born film director Roger Donaldson, did divorce her mother, Mel Clark, but whether she behaved like her teenage protagonist, Sam (Lily Collias), who lives with her mother but chooses not to take sides, is none of this reviewer’s business. What I can categorically write is that her film repays three viewings – two at Cannes, one in a small arthouse cinema in Paris. It is not a film in which the characters emote, tell each other how they feel, and have a cathartic moment. Rather the film, set over a three-day walking holiday, shows the moment that defines how Sam and her father Chris (James Le Gros) will treat each other in the future.

Good One isn’t just a film about living with divorce. It is a drama – or rather anti-drama – about how men see women when they are in the company of other men. Which is to say that they are not complimentary. One woman is described as a ‘witch’, another is the butt of a joke, wearing flip flops on a walking holiday. In the movie, men give other men the benefit of the doubt. Matt (Danny McCarthy), a friend of Sam’s father who joins the father and daughter on their trip, is described as a ‘fool’. ‘In tarot, the fool is seen as an enlightened adventurer,’ he is told. At the climax, Sam gives Matt the benefit of the doubt over his daughter. ‘Let’s just have a good day,’ he tells her, wanting to avoid confrontation because, it is implied, it would be too much trouble for everyone involved.

If the film were just about living with divorce as well taking down toxic masculinity, that would be enough. But Good One has a third subject: the attraction of the woods. A place where social and generational barriers disappear in the shared resource that is the great outdoors. It’s a place that Chris can retreat to in order to forget his troubles and be at one with all he surveys. That feeling is a projection, something you tell yourself. In one scene, Chris, Matt and Sam stand on the top of a rocky promontory. ‘What do you think, Sam?’ asks Chris. ‘This in our top five?’ ’Yes,’ replies Sam, because she doesn’t want to deflate her father, to make him lose face (or rock face) in front of Matt. This moment of false enthusiasm is offset by real emotion. Matt wishes they could do this more often. He wishes his teenage son, Dylan (Julian Grady) – seen in an early scene briefly from a distance - was on the trip with them. Watching his friend share a moment with a family member brings out Matt’s inadequacies, a nasal spurt of self-pity. The irony is that the special moment between Chris and Sam isn’t special at all. Sam is humouring her father.

Sam really wants her father to see her. Not that she acknowledges this at the beginning of the film. Until her mobile signal disappears – another levelling function of the woods – she is on the phone to her best friend Jessie (Sumaya Bourbal), who later tell her that a mutual friend made a tofu lasagne, and it was terrible. A shared joke is often at someone else’s expense. Sam plays her own joke, which is her way of telling Chris and Matt, what the f-!

Pictured: Sam (Lily Collias) in a scene from the father-daughter hiking trip drama, 'Good One', written and directed by India Donaldson. Still courtesy of Metrograph Pictures (US)

The real and the artificial are constantly contrasted. Sam sees what’s around her; we observe her looking up at socks on a makeshift clothesline, or down at a worm that she points out to her father. You imagine that on earlier trips, Chris used the trip to demonstrate his knowledge; now Sam is showing things to him. It takes him until the third day to ask, ‘so are you excited about going to college?’ ‘That’s the first question you’ve asked me this trip,’ Sam replies. ‘It is not’, insists Chris. Both Matt and Chris project onto Sam their ideas about her, notably in a restaurant scene prior to their walk in the woods. First Matt teases Sam about Jessie, calling her ‘a lady friend’. Then they insist that Sam is a vegetarian. ‘You seem like a vegetarian,’ adds Matt, even as she devours a burger and fries. During the meal, Chris takes one of his daughter’s French fries. It is implied that he paid for it, so it is his right. ‘Eat your own food,’ Sam tells him. Chris responds by putting a fish nugget on her plate. ‘Fair trade,’ he explains, playing the father who wants to be seen as feeding his daughter. ‘I don’t want your frozen fish,’ replies Sam, putting the fish nugget back on his plate. ‘Oh, you will be begging for my frozen fish,’ laughs Chris, referring to the lack of food options they will experience in the forest. When Matt says Sam ‘seems’ like a vegetarian, he is referring to her virtuous behaviour. Sam demonstrates empathy for both Dylan and Matt. She describes Dylan as refusing to go on the camping trip because ‘he was defending his mother’. ‘He didn’t want to take sides,’ she explains. At least twice Matt asks Sam, ‘how did you get so wise?’ He is disingenuous, or at least doesn’t see much of the world beyond himself. Never once does he refer to Sam as a child of divorce and therefore likely to have shared Dylan’s feelings. Conversely, on the rocky promontory, Sam notices Matt’s fragility and urges her father to acknowledge it. Matt didn’t intend to be the third wheel. It was supposed to be two late middle-aged men and their teenage kids on a joint bonding exercise. Except that, under the circumstances, Sam and Chris’ bond shatters.

Sam’s ‘virtuousness’ includes calling her father out over his view of a female customer. During the ride to the Catskills, Chris receives a message. The customer is concerned about the lack of materials being delivered. Giving her the phone, Chris asks Sam to reply for him. The customer responds, ‘the work must begin on Tuesday.’ Chris instructs Sam to type, ‘the work will be completed by the agreed upon date.’ ‘Is that a little cold?’ asks Sam. She waits her father to apologise for the late start. ‘Don’t do that,’ Matt says. The customer is described as ‘one of those’. ‘One of those what?’ asks Sam. ‘She’s having an outdoor kitchen being built three feet from her indoor kitchen,’ barks Chris, by way of explanation. Finally he tells Sam, ‘type ‘Roger that’. That’s R – o…’ ‘I’ve done it,’ says Sam, handing back the phone.

Sam’s attitude towards men is best described as ambivalent. At no point in the film does she discuss a boyfriend. This feels deliberate. One view of relationships posits that women are attracted to men who remind them of their fathers, protective, powerful, compassionate. A child of divorce, Sam doesn’t want that. There is the suggestion that she wants to love her father, a man who fell for a twenty-five-year-old woman who flattered him, then reached thirty and got serious, wanting a child. ‘Touche. You tell my story well,’ Chris tells her. Chris venerates parenthood in front of three young men who decide to share the camping space chosen by Chris, Matt and Sam. Sam is uncomfortable with their presence and looks to her father to ask them to leave. However, he is disinclined to do so. For Chris, being amongst young men is an opportunity to show he is the Alpha Male, that he has walked – so to speak – the farthest. The young men have virility on their side, having the desire to walk in Mexico. ‘I was thinking of walking in China,’ says Chris, playing his trump card. ‘Will you come with me, Sam?’ ‘Yes,’ says Sam, not wanting to burst his bubble. Two of the young men say they’ll join him. Chris looks at Matt, as an afterthought. ‘You can come too, but you’ll have to work on your core.’ This is by way of a brutal riposte to his friend, who earlier talked about running a marathon, something Chris has never done. ‘You see eighty-year-olds running marathons,’ Matt adds, by way of justifying why he could also do so. ‘That’s because they’ve been running them all their lives,’ says Chris. His Alpha instincts are a compulsion - behaviour that’s addictive. He doesn’t think about what it means to be in constant competition with others, in a constant state of projection. 

Pictured: Matt (Danny McCarthy) and Chris (James Le Gros) in a scene from writer-director India Donaldson's hiking trip drama, 'Good One'. Still courtesy of Metrograph Pictures (US)

On another level, Good One - the title not only referring to Sam but also to the punchline of a joke that one slightly disapproves of – is about a young woman who has coming of age. At two points in the film, we see Sam go to the toilet, applying a tampon off camera. ‘How was your nature pee?’ Matt asks on the second occasion, insensitive to feminine hygiene. Sam is fast establishing her adult identity in the face of her father who treats her as a child. This is evidenced first by making her share a room with the two men – ‘it won’t kill you,’ Chris explains – then sharing Chris’ tent. In the first scene, seen through a doorway, both Chris and Matt flop onto twin beds, leaving no room for Sam. In the only scene in which Sam doesn’t appear, Matt and Chris have a drink during which Matt tries to name the days of the week in Spanish. ‘Six out of seven is good.’ Meanwhile, Sam sleeps on the floor, first taking her father’s pillow before replacing it and using her jacket as a pillow. She doesn’t want to upset either man. By the end of the film, she has no qualms about putting rocks in both men’s backpacks.

There is one moment of deadpan humour. One of the three young men describes how a guy he knows is walking to Canada in honour of his dead friend. ‘Was he a walker?’ Sam asks. ‘No,’ replies the guy, ‘he’s dead.’ It illustrates man’s wilful desire to misunderstand women. At no point does Matt show his understanding of why April, the flip flop walking companion, left the group. Matt posits himself as a victim, telling his story: an actor who had a recurring role on television, who lived ‘high on the hog,’ experienced unemployment after the jobs dried off, took a job selling appliances on television, became the guy who trained others to do the same, allowed a young female trainee to put her hand on his leg, thereby ending his marriage. ‘This didn’t happen to you. You participated,’ Sam responds. Matt reluctantly concedes the point.

For a while, Matt is the butt of the film’s humour. Chris humiliates him by emptying out his backpack to remove his inessentials. Sam takes a photo of his possessions spread on the grass and sends it to Jessie with the caption, ‘heading into the woods’. Then Matt reveals that he left his sleeping bag in the car. ‘I’ll sleep close to the forest,’ he says. Chris is dismayed by Matt’s second pair of jeans. ‘I’m not going to wear one pair of jeans for three days,’ he explains. ‘Why are you wearing jeans at all?’ Chris asks. Matt later cuts the trouser ends from his jeans, turning them into shorts. During their second night in the forest, after Chris has retired for the evening drunk, Matt asks if Sam wouldn’t mind keeping him warm in his tent. Sam has no words. Neither does Chris.

The final day takes place at a lake where someone – perhaps more than one person – has erected towers of stones, six or seven in height. There Chris invites Sam to go swimming whilst Matt sunbathes. Sam tells her father what Matt said the previous evening. She is offended by his response. Chris truly doesn’t see her. Sam uses stones to make her point.

The finale is a series of stand offs. Sam leaves the two men asleep to walk back to the car by herself, visibly distressed. Chris tries to placate her by offering the chance to drive. Sam refuses. Appearing to accede to her father’s request, Sam then locks the two men outside. She waits for an apology. Matt says nothing. Finally, Chris pulls out a stone and places it on the dashboard. He sees her, but not as she would like.

The advertising and the film’s casual, low-stakes tone, might have dissuaded audiences. My experience of Good One began with being unable to buy a ticket for the premiere screening, seeing it the following day in a near-full venue, then watching it on the same day at a third-full Cannes cinephile screening to finally seeing it on release in Paris at an otherwise empty 12:00 midday matinee screening. There are some films for which the advertising should be oblique, to intrigue and draw in an audience. Good One is one of those. Not only will it stay with you, but it rewards reviewing down to the song over the end credits, ‘Two Tall Mountains’, sung by Connie Converse, with its drily witty lyrics.

Reviewed at Cinema l’Ecran de Saint Denis, Screen Two, Paris, France, Friday 29 November 2024, 12:00 midday screening. Also Cinema Les Arcades Screen One, Cannes, France, Tuesday 21 May 2024, 11:30am screening; Salle Alexandre III, Cannes, France, 18:00, Tuesday 21 May 2024.