It’s Nice of Michael Keaton to Star in Goodrich

Something that I often find unaccountably moving in film and TV is when a character shows a steadying and levelheaded kindness to someone in crisis, and then, in a moment to themselves, privately breaks down, accessing the emotions that have been teased out (and then pushed back down) by the situation at hand. Michael Keaton has a moment like that in Goodrich, and then, 20 or 30 minutes later, another. I found them both effective, because Keaton is a terrific actor, and especially well-suited to that particular gesture. He has the kind of presence that makes you sit up and pay a little more attention to whatever he’s saying, and his restless, punchy manner is unsentimental enough to sell sappy material, even as he appears to sidestep it.

Goodrich ultimately requires more sidestepping than one man can handle. By billing, logline, and certain key scenes, it is ostensibly a father-daughter story about Andy Goodrich (Michael Keaton), who dedicates much of his life to the running of an art gallery, and his grown daughter Grace (Mila Kunis), pregnant with her first child. Andy, like a lot of well-to-do older guys, also has some younger children: a pair of nine-year-old twins from his second marriage. But when Andy’s wife unexpectedly leaves for rehab – she has a pill addiction he has somehow failed to notice – and signals that she wishes to end their marriage, these changes thrust him into a more active parenting role than he’s used to. It’s like a 40-year bookend to Keaton’s early hit Mr. Mom.

The general idea seems to be that an overwhelmed Andy would seek help from Grace, who is having her own problems balancing her career with impending parenthood. That’s the thrust of a few scenes, but mostly Andy and Grace make some glancing connections, during which she looks slightly askance at the dad she knew from a relative distance now learning, belatedly, how to be more hands-on with her half-siblings. It’s an intriguingly complicated dynamic – and one that the movie talks around endlessly, essentially waiting around for Grace to blow up about it.

It often feels as if writer-director Hallie Meyers-Shyer is putting off that confrontation, not for screenplay structural reasons so much as her own preferences. She appears to have inherited from her filmmaker mother Nancy Meyers a penchant for scenes where people may talk endlessly and occasionally rib each other, but are basically expressing fair-minded decency – minus the elder Meyers’ compulsion for those scenes to take place in monuments to conspicuous consumption. (Not that anyone in Goodrich is less than, well, rich, but they seem less particularly attached to their pillows and unused copper pots and such.) If the dialogue were funnier, this might have the fine makings of a hang-out comedy, but instead Keaton natters, Kunis does some light eye-rolling, and every exchange distends into half-finished hemming and hawing.

Weirder, many of the scenes don’t involve Kunis at all. Andy’s gallery is in dire financial straits, and though the movie wants to chide him for his passive, half-there parenting style – his lack of familiarity with his own house is a running gag that tests believability; the guy doesn’t know where to find the salt in his own kitchen? – Meyers-Shyer actually pays nearly as much attention to his work as anything else in the movie. (Maybe more, considering how easily the younger kids are shunted off-screen during the back half of the movie.) This could offer a neat subversion of the countless movies where a gainfully employed dad must learn to ignore the job that keeps a roof over his family’s head without any real threat of financial repercussions. Instead, it creates an impression of ease; adding Carmen Ejogo (playing the daughter of a famous and recently deceased artist) into the thankless round-robin of characters who exchange pleasantries with Goodrich. Michael Urie is there, too, as a fellow divorced dad who becomes Goodrich’s friend and sometime confidante.

It’s harmless enough, and maybe this strategy is designed to put us in Grace’s shoes, wondering why Andy Goodrich has to make himself available to so many side characters (and his own interests) when his family’s needs are more urgent. But Kunis isn’t in enough of the movie to bring that idea home, or even to make Andy feel like a guy who’s been cultivating his selfishness for decades. She’s just one face among many in an anthology of scenes where Michael Keaton is basically nice to people, and when he’s not nice enough, he quickly realizes he needs to be nicer. That niceness extends to Keaton himself, because doing this rambling, half-formed movie, and infusing it with some emotion where he can, starts to look like an awfully big favor.

Director: Hallie Meyers-Shyer
Writer: Hallie Meyers-Shyer
Starring: Michael Keaton, Mila Kunis, Carmen Ejogo, Michael Urie, Vivien Lyra Blair
Release date: October 18, 2024

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on Twitter under the handle @rockmarooned.