Good and rich in comedy, drama and pathos, GOODRICH is an unheralded feel good gem, another showcase for the incomparable Michael Keaton.
Keaton plays Andy Goodrich, the affable but flawed gallery owner whose life is upended when his wife and mother of their nine-year-old twins unexpectedly enters a 90-day rehab program to ween her off her prescription pills addiction.
Facing a financial crisis on top of this unforeseen twist, Goodrich leans on his daughter from his first marriage, Grace, who is pregnant with her first child.
Goodrich’s life has always largely been consumed by work causing Andy to never really give his kids the father they deserve. Suddenly plunged into a state of single parenthood, Andy endeavours to give his twins the very thing Grace’s childhood lacked. Him.
Complex family dynamics is front and centre in writer director Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s funny and emotional film. GOODRICH is both dark and light, textured and sophisticated, about coming of age at any age.
There’s a genuine sentimentality at play in GOODRICH, that never veers into saccharine schmaltz, although it does come perilously close. Every time it appears the film is heading into sappy territory, Keaton side steps it. It’s a quality that Keaton has shown in the past and it’s in spades here.
Layered like a lasagne and with several spaghetti strands of narrative, GOODRICH has a rich sauce of supporting players, including Mila Kunis as Grace, Michael Urie as a simpatico single dad whose child attends the same school as the twins, Carmen Ejogo as a performance artist who holds out a lifeline to Andy, and a cute cameo from Andie McDowell as Goodrich’s first wife.
But it’s primarily Keaton’s film, with a punchy, unflappably puzzled, quizzically controlled performance.
GOODRICH treads an engaging and entertaining road, a journey that never tires.
