REVIEW: All Good Things (dir. Andrew Jarecki)

Kirsten Dunst's great gift has always been for seeming luminously in love. She's so believably gaga for her co-stars, they never seem more alive than when caught in those sleepy, basilisk eyes of hers. The Spiderman movies were pretty plastic, but came alive as swoony valentines to their teenage superhero when Dunst's Mary Jane was on screen, drinking him in. Tobey Maguire was a terrible choice for the title role, doughy and sleepy where he should have been angular and alert, but whenever Dunst gazed on him, the poor dope came alive as a superhero, if only in her eyes, her face a picture of molten adoration. Fresh from The Virgin Suicides, she turned the whole franchise into a piece of Lichtenstein pop longing. She performs similar honors for Ryan Gosling in All Good Things, not that he needs it, but the plot plays wonderful tricks with her devotion. Gosling plays David Marks, the ne-er do-well son of a property magnate family, who may or may not have murdered his wife when she tried to divorce him. The film is based on a real-life case which I was unfamiliar with but seems to fits the bill of all the other murder cases one reads about in which an entitled rich kid disposes of a wife as if she were trash. The film is framed as a woman's melodrama in the vein of Suspicion and Sleeping With the Enemy, with Dunst as the young wife gradually coming to the realisation that her husband may be a lunatic, but it's many times better than the Roberts film, possessed of a genuine clamminess of palm, grimily textured in the same way that Jarecki's documentary, Meeting the Freidmans, was, and with much the same feel for ingrown families imploding, like impacted molars. The Marks, ruled over by a beady-eyed Frank Langella, are fucked up as only the exceedingly rich can be. Gosling is very subtle as the black sheep of the family: pot-smoking, oedipally damaged, dragged into the family business against his will, quietly crumbling under the pressure in a way that makes Dunst want to pet him and tell him everything will be alright. "There's nothing I do that she doesn't like," he says, incredulously. Gradually, the truth dawns on her, and when it does Dunst's face is awful to behold: it's as if something has a hold of her deep inside, and is twisting slowly. I won't go into what happens, but the final act is so memorably strange as to have the unfakable tang of reality. No screen-writer would dare write it. That kind of weird. Jarecki may well have shot David Lynch's favorite 20 minutes of the year. B-