Best Actor Watch: Michael Keaton as Goodrich

You can’t see the name Hallie Meyers-Shyer and know what it means. I guess you might not if you are a young person, but if you grew up in the 1990s, you would know. The daughter of the two filmmakers who used to work together, then split, then Nancy Meyers made movies about their breakup. They went like this: a great woman is dumped by a terrible man and finds love or happiness again.

These movies are like sitting in a warm bubble bath while drinking champagne and having every part of your body massaged. That is, if you are an older woman, especially if you’ve been dumped by a terrible man, especially if you’ve been married and been left for a younger woman.

I don’t know the story of Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers’s breakup, but I have no choice but to make assumptions based on the films she’s made. All of that to say that their child is all grown up and now has made a movie about a man whose younger wife has gone into rehab and how his daughter, Mila Kunis, must be pregnant and somehow forge a relationship with him.

Here is the trailer:

This is Meyers-Shyer’s second movie. Her first was Home Again, with Reese Witherspoon, which came out in 2017. I have never seen it, so I can’t say whether it is good or not.

I’d put GoodRich in the genre of Therapy Movies, movies that are working out stuff from therapy but are also about therapy. It’s hard to measure just how influential therapy culture has been to movies and books. One could argue that is how we ended up in the place we’re in now, which I will not go into. It’s the idea that there is a “right” and a “wrong” way to be as a person. When I refer to the world we built over the last 20 years as a “utopia,” that’s what I mean: we fixed ourselves, we fixed our world. But it can it ever be fixed?

So many movies now are about this very thing. But this one is also a character drama, one that might resonate with other people in the situation of having both parents to deal with in life after a divorce. Watching Michael Keaton in this kind of a role is always a pleasure, I think.

Most people know Nancy Meyers for writing and directing The Holiday, a beloved Christmas movie starring Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, and others. She also wrote and directed Something’s Gotta Give, It’s Complicated, and The Intern.

The joke about her is that her movies are insane house porn. Fact check: true. They are also a wee bit on the unrealistic side, though well-intentioned. As I said, like taking a warm bubble bath. I expect if she were to make a Nancy Meyers movie today, it would have to be changed up, as another complaint about her movies is that they only reflect the upper-class white people’s world.

Nancy Meyers has developed a bit of a cult following, especially in the YouTube/TikTok age, mainly for the style.

Goodrich is on my radar because Michael Keaton is in the lead, and Mila Kunis in supporting. While it’s probably outside the reach of the Oscars, it seems a good fit for the Golden Globes in the Musical/Comedy section. If it’s good, it’s landing in theaters in the award season sweet spot. I assume it’s a theatrical release and not a streaming thing.

I liked the first comment on the trailer by a young woman: