Good One Takes to the Woods for a Gorgeous and Subtle Coming-of-Age Story

There are days when the maxim “No good deed goes unpunished” feels unbearably weighty, when having done the right thing, the good thing, becomes a burden you wish you could shrug off. Writer-director India Donaldson’s gorgeous and subtle debut Good One is about one of those days, specifically the kind of moment that makes you wish you could turn back the clock, just by a minute, and rearrange the whole scene. It’s about the way humans, blinded by their own neediness, can take advantage of others’ kindness and empathy without even meaning to. And it’s also about being a kid, a teenager who may still be figuring out the world but who has common sense and compassion on her side. The movie doesn’t clamp down on any of these ideas; instead, they’re like shimmery minnows slipping and darting just beneath the water’s surface. This is a small, delicate film, but its ripples linger.

Seventeen-year-old Sam (Lily Collias) is headed out for a weekend camping trip in the Catskills with her dad, Chris (James Le Gros), who’s been divorced from Sam’s mother for a while. Chris’ oldest friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy), a boisterous, underemployed actor who's still reeling from a recent divorce, is going with them—his teenage son was supposed to come along, but bailed at the last minute. Lily seems mildly annoyed to be stuck with these two old men for the weekend; before she’s too far into the wilderness, while she can still get a signal, she checks her phone and gets an update on a party she’s missing. But she likes Matt, as annoying as he can be, and she’s been on so many hiking trips with her dad that they’ve become a worn-in tradition. She also seems to know, without articulating it for herself, that the era of these father-daughter trips is close to its end. She’s off to college soon, and we know—even if she doesn’t—how much her life is likely to change.

Chris is an experienced hiker and an affable know-it-all. Sam doesn’t even have to roll her eyes at him; her affectionate exasperation is implied. Matt is the sort of guy who fills his pack with junk food and enough cups and dishes to accommodate 20 campers. He’s brought extra jeans because he can’t imagine wearing the same pair for three days. And, to Chris and Sam’s dismay, he’s forgotten his sleeping bag. But they shouldn’t worry about him getting cold at night—he’s brought a beanie! Matt is a bit of a mess, but at least he's an endearing one. Chris needles him relentlessly, but over the decades their idiosyncrasies have become a kind of Superglue; they’re stuck to, and with, each other forever.

Sam intuitively gets that, and though she teases her father, a bit heartlessly, about being an old man who’s just fathered a child with his new partner, she’s also attuned to what makes these two men feel so sad and lost. She takes good care of them on the trail, filtering their drinking water for them and rustling up a ramen-noodle meal that they devour with gusto. (“You guys are like little monsters,” she says as they slurp away.) She listens sympathetically as, drunk in front of the campfire, Matt jabbers on about the bummer his life has become. She’s picking up on the very vibrations of his sadness. You can see it in the pitch of her eyebrows—they’re like antenna poised to respond to the emotions of those around her, even those of exasperating old dudes.

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And then everything shifts, in a flash of time that can’t be reeled back. Shot by Wilson Cameron, Good One carries us along on waves of visual tranquility. We see trees ruffled by the wind, and a traffic-cone-orange newt skittering along a rock's surface. Sam spots a slug sliming its way along a bed of moist leaves and points it out to her father—even these yucky creatures can look like miniature miracles. But the movie’s turning point makes all of those wonders feel sad in retrospect. Nature may not let us down, but boy, people sure can.

You can’t make a movie as understated as this one without good actors, and Donaldson has rounded up three of them. McCarthy’s Matt is such a clueless motormouth you sometimes want to smack him. But when he explains how a new moon can reflect sunlight back at the earth, as if returning a blessing, a phenomenon known as earthshine, you can hardly hate him. McCarthy shows us the tenderness behind Matt’s actorly bluster. Le Gros, always a terrific actor, plays Chris as one of those semi-self-absorbed dads who knows his daughter is so well-adjusted he doesn’t have to worry about her, not realizing that good parenting is less about worrying than about truly seeing and hearing the young human being standing before you.

But Collias is the brightest presence in this triangular constellation. She says a lot, while doing very little. At one point a trio of good-natured twenty-something slackers set up camp about 10 yards away from her little crew. Sam is annoyed at first, but then we see how her face opens in the presence of their affable chatter. They’re goofy as hell, but they’ve got youth on their side, while Sam is stuck spending a whole weekend with a couple of complaining, nearing-60 dudes. She’s at the beginning of everything—more than once, we see her duck behind a tree to change out her tampon, evidence of the reality that she’s a young, vital person fully capable of giving life. Meanwhile, the two clueless old-timers in her orbit natter on about their man problems. Collias captures something gossamer here, a quiet shift into adult womanhood that happens, literally, overnight. She’s the new moon, ready to emerge. But unlike the moon, she makes her own light.