The Movie Room

All Good Things 2013, directed by Andrew Jarecki

Rating: 6/10

This was a recent purchase added into my collection as I impatiently waited for new episodes of the second season of The Jinx. When I saw All Good Things years ago, before the first season of The Jinx, it didn’t leave much of an impression on me other than “meh.” It still isn’t a great film in and of itself, but the legacy it has now is quite compelling.

The movie goes back and forth in time, but the general trajectory splits it in half between the young married couple years and the older cross-dressing years. I expected to like the former more as I love anything Kirsten Dunst does, but it is actually the part that bored me the most, perhaps because there is not really any suspense as to what happens to her character. But once Ryan Gosling has moved on from his marriage and ages a few decades, I was drawn back into the film. It still wasn’t great, but I enjoyed the purposeful awfulness of Gosling’s drag and his relationship with Philip Baker Hall’s crotchety neighbor. I wish those two eras were more intertwined throughout instead of the kind-of-non-linear-but-actually-pretty-linear structure that divides the film. We already know what happens to Kirsten Dunst’s character (or at least we have suspicions) from the moment the movie starts, pretty much, so I think instead of spending so much time building up to it and then having it be a mid-point, it would have been more impactful to have it be told throughout the film to Hall’s character, whose reaction to the story could have been our hook. I don’t want to ding this movie for not doing what I wish it had done, but the way it is structured just doesn’t fully work for me. 

What makes me happy that I bought this film is the unexpected surprise of having a commentary track by the director (Andrew Jarecki) and Robert Durst (the inspiration). There is no admission of guilt here, and there are scenes where he talks about things other than the murders I wish he would talk about, but that is to be expected—a DVD commentary track is not the place to confess (though neither is a hotel bathroom with a microphone on) to anything he may have some information about (at the very least). Still, there are plenty of moments that he speaks about that really sing for fans of The Jinx such as when the film implies he kills a dog, and he voices his discontent with that choice. The banter between Durst and Jarecki is also just a real selling point of this commentary, as it was in the first season of The Jinx; at one point they laugh about a misunderstanding over whether Durst was watching actual traffic or the film Traffic, and they chase down entertaining tangents, such as when Durst goes on at length about the fad that was primal therapy.

All Good Things was not a film that I remembered much beyond “I think it starred Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst?” but now post-The Jinx, it is fascinating that Jarecki was able to make a movie that pretty directly accuses Durst of murdering at least three people (and a dog) and then Durst would contact him in order to make a documentary about said alleged crimes (and apparently a DVD commentary track). It seems like this film is almost always being pushed on one streaming service or another, but I am glad to own it for that unexpected special feature.