128 min | R | March 24, 2023 | MGM
Florence Pugh causes a car crash, loses everything, and falls into opioid addiction. Morgan Freeman plays the grieving grandfather she cannot avoid. The two of them are worth watching, even when Zach Braff reaches for the Kleenex.
Allison is engaged to Nathan and planning a wedding when she takes a wrong turn and causes a crash that kills two members of his family. A year later she is unemployed, living with her mother, and hooked on the opioids prescribed for her injuries. Daniel is the grandfather of the teenager orphaned by that crash and a recovering alcoholic himself. When Allison and Daniel meet again at a recovery meeting, the film becomes a study of two people circling the same wound from opposite sides. Zach Braff wants to make a movie about guilt and forgiveness. He keeps reaching for sentiment instead.
Florence Pugh plays Allison with a rawness the script does not always earn. She shows the addiction in her body, in the way she scans a medicine cabinet and the practiced calm she uses to ask a doctor for a refill. Morgan Freeman plays Daniel as a man holding his grief and his sobriety in the same clenched grip. His best scenes are quiet ones where he tends to a model train set in the basement and says nothing. Molly Shannon plays Diane, Allison’s mother, and turns hovering concern into something close to panic. Celeste O’Connor plays Ryan, the orphaned granddaughter, as a teenager furious at everyone who survived.
Braff writes and directs, and his instincts run toward the soft and the underlined. He builds the film around recovery meetings and suburban New Jersey kitchens shot in warm amber light. The trouble is the soundtrack. Braff stacks plaintive indie ballads under scenes that Pugh and Freeman have already played to the rafters, so the music tells you what to feel after you already feel it. The crosscutting between Allison’s spiral and Daniel’s restraint sets up a parallel structure the script never fully trusts. Braff has a real story here and keeps decorating it.
The center of the film is the relationship between Allison and Daniel, and when Pugh and Freeman share the frame it works. Two people who have every reason to hate each other discover they need each other to stay alive. That is a strong premise and a strong pairing. Braff surrounds it with subplots, a wedding that never happened, a teenager acting out, a mother at her wits end, until the core loses its air. The good movie is the two-hander about guilt and survival. This one keeps wandering away from it.