How do you get your life back in order when you experience a great loss? We have all felt the domino effect of everything going wrong at once, but Tom Stuart’s Good Boy adds a layer of acidic amusement to it. When it rains, it pours shit on top of Ben Whishaw’s unfortunate head. Stuart’s film feels like a wounded heart: its humor is brittle but Stuart’s direction and Whishaw’s emotionally unguarded performance create a comforting goodbye.
Whishaw plays Danny, a grieving young man who can’t catch a break. At the start of the film, he sits in his family’s cluttered van trying to muster up the courage to rob a bank and snag some cash as his mother, Jackie (played by warm Marion Bailey), offers her maternal support. Despite the comic beginnings, we can feel Stuart’s personal touch immediately.
“So much of the tone of the film is imbued with my Mum’s anarchic, warm energy so it was really lucky that Ben had known her,” Stuart says. “It meant that we had a great short-hand together. Ben is someone who I feel very comfortable with–he’s honest and curious about the world so I felt comfortable opening up to him and letting him in on some of the grief that inspired the film. The fact that I was drawing from some of my own story meant that I could offer Ben some direct insight in to how his character was feeling.”
Stuart deploys comedy and surrealism throughout Good Boy to marvelous effect. Danny doesn’t look like the type of person who brandishes a weapon often, so watching Whishaw struggle with the size of the gun is comical–it almost feels like it shares the same length as one of Whishaw’s long limbs. Without that lighter touch, the ending of the film would feel different.
“I think comedy relaxes an audience into the world of the film,” he says. “In real life humans use humor as a quick way to connect with each other and it’s the same with film: when we laugh with – or at – a character, we start to see ourselves in them, so it’s a fast way to get an audience onside. The surrealist moments are there to surprise the viewer, to keep them intrigued and motivated to work out the puzzle of the story. Ben is such a gifted comedic actor and he isn’t afraid to look daft – which really helps!
Danny isn’t just having his worst day–he’s having the worst series of days and weeks in his life. Whishaw is one of our most underrated criers, his gentle eyes inviting us in. Stuart brings the camera up to Whishaw’s face throughout his film, and we feel like we are getting a glimpse into his heart.
“I have a feeling that Danny doesn’t really see himself like that, as gentle,” Whishaw admits. “I think he sees himself as a bit of a mess. And very conflicted and a bit of a failure. But he never loses his hope and maybe there’s gentleness in that.”
Bailey is such a supporting presence on screen–she feels like the mother everyone dreams of having. She and Whishaw don’t even have to be looking at one another to feel their connection, and Jackie looks at her son with such love and affirmation. It’s enthralling to see that bond when they didn’t have that much time to rehearse with one another.
“We had a day of rehearsal, me, Marion and Tom Stuart, and we did discuss the backstory of these characters,” Whishaw says. “The rest of it was just very playful–easy, playful, and fun. Marion is such a wonderful actor. I’ve admired her for such a long time – such a treat to get to act opposite her.”
At the start of the film, Marion wears brown, bushy fur coat with a bronze brooch, and then Danny dons it later as the film comes to an end. It’s a piece that carries so much weight to Danny and conveys so much emotion to the viewer. When we lose someone, we look to clothing and personal items to help us cling to their memory and ease our pain. Whishaw wearing that coat is a stunning image, and it hints that more men need to not be afraid of their natural feelings.
“I don’t think I could have asked for a more perfect description of my intentions with the coat–I’m so thrilled that you got all that from it,” Stuart says. The thing we see least often from men on screen is vulnerability. Our culture rewards men who appear strong, powerful, driven and decisive, but there is more power and honesty in softness and vulnerability.”
“I would like to see more depictions of men and women that show how the qualities we associate with masculinity and femininity run through us all,” Whishaw adds. “We’re all kind of intricately marbled with these different qualities and different emotions. No one is all one thing or another.”
Good Boy ends with a perfect musical cue. The plinky electronic notes hint back at the quirkiness that we started with, but it doesn’t abandon our feelings. When Stuart heard the song for the first time, he knew he found something that echoed the heart of his film. You leave Good Boy feeling a kind of solace you cannot pinpoint.
“It’s such an amazing song, isn’t it,” Stuart says. “It’s “Electricity” by OMD. It came on in a café when I was trying to write the script and it blew me away because it has this warm, fun anarchy about it which reminded me of my Mum and mirrored the tone that I was looking for in the film. It’s also a very hopeful song, and it was important to me that the film ended with hope.”
