The Good Mother is a 2023 crime-mystery following a journalist who sets out to solve the mystery of who murdered her son with the assistance of the son’s girlfriend.
Hell hath no fury like the scorn coming from an investigative journalist mother. Marissa (Hilary Swank) is that mother. At the moment she’s introduced, she’s not exactly scornful, but sluggish in general. It’s 2016, with years gone by since the passing of her husband, and Marissa has chosen to deal with her grief with alcohol. It doesn’t help that upon her arrival to work one day, she’s notified of the murder of her estranged son, Michael, by her other son, officer Toby (Jack Reynor).
At the funeral, Marissa spots Paige (Olivia Cooke), in the last trimester of her pregnancy. Marissa and Paige have a tumultuously nonexistent relationship, attributed to the fact that Paige and Michael were longtime drug addicts who reportedly became clean recently as told by Paige. Nevertheless, the father was Michael, and the tenuous duo form an uneasy alliance to track down exactly what happened to their loved one in what becomes a twisted trek to justice in Albany, New York.
It is typically not a good sign for your movie if in the summary, no reference to the third star—in this case, Reynor, is made. Presumably, it’s to keep the plot a mystery even though they make a reference to it. Problem is, the main twist is telegraphed so early that it takes the initial intrigue out of The Good Mother and leaves it in a constant state of stasis it never escapes from. Compound that with a few other unfortunate flaws and it is miserably forgettable.
The film is directed and co-written by Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, a native of the city his film takes place in. It’s not a bad choice at all to film and place the story in Albany, as it isn’t hard to see the sketch of what he’s going for with a no-frills, scaled-down, intimately gritty crime-mystery. These types of flicks are usually held and situated in the more famous NYC, but Albany has been an epicenter of the opioid epidemic and as such, The Good Mother does carry a bit of authenticity to it. What doesn’t make a whole bunch of sense is why specifically the feature had to take place in 2016 as the epidemic is still going on in multiple places. Stylistically, it looks more like 2006 with Marissa bizarrely using a flip phone for communication, and inadequate lighting along with wonky editing makes a few big moments hard to follow. A weirdly inconsistent score toggles from traditional to hip-hop non-diegetic sounds.
It’s also typically not a good sign for your movie if the first ten minutes possesses a murder and a woman punching a pregnant woman…and it still feels sleepy. The inability of Joris-Peyrafitte and Madison Harrison to commit to a lane of hard-boiled mystery or character study negatively impacts the final quality. The Good Mother deals with heavy topics and tries to position its two female characters on opposite ends of the epidemic linked together by a common person, but we find out little about either. Swank’s Marissa in particular becomes harder to sympathize with the longer the movie goes on, and we only get more details regarding her sons at the very end. By that point, most will be checked out.
What will it take for Swank and/or her agent to get (or maybe identify) a better script? It’s been a while since the two-time Academy Award winner was in something buzz-worthy. As stated previously, the dullness of mostly everything doesn’t allow the cast any opportunity to add juice. Even Fatale (recently trending as a top 10 movie on Netflix), far from great, allowed Swank to get crazy, but she along with everyone appears lethargic. However, a payday is a payday.
Lifeless from the get-go, The Good Mother is in desperate need of so many injections, namely energy at the most bare minimum. It arguably ends in the same place it began, not quite what you want to see from a film like this.