Good Grief, review: an earnest, overcast take on gay love and loss
Goodwill going into Good Grief may hinge for you on Schitt’s Creek – the smash Canadian sitcom co-created by this film’s writer-director, Dan Levy. Cards on the table: that show was a gloriously warm and funny achievement, winning us round in stages to a set of characters who were all but unbearable at the start.
For his feature debut, Levy has crafted a comedy-drama which nudges, perhaps surprisingly, more towards the latter pole. Where we might expect a reliable volley of catty putdowns and farcical misunderstandings, we instead get an earnest, overcast take on gay love and loss. There’s something ever-so-chic, a touch too manicured about the film’s despondency, and only rare moments land to touch us, especially. But it’s a gentle, genial watch.
It opens with a swish Notting Hill Christmas party thrown by Marc (Levy) and his well-known husband Oliver (Luke Evans), a JK Rowling-esque publishing phenomenon whose books Marc has taken to illustrating, after giving up his earlier career as a painter. Tragedy strikes a stone’s throw from their doorstep – not entirely convincingly – when Oliver departs for a late flight in a cab, which crashes down the street.
It’s nearly a year after his death before Marc can bring himself to open the parting Christmas card Oliver left, which conveys the non-heart-swelling news that he’d lately met someone else. Not only this, but the existence of a pied à terre in Paris, recently purchased, comes as a complete shock. Without filling in his best friends Thomas (Himesh Patel) and Sophie (Ruth Negga) on the gory details, Marc invites them on a jaunt there to mark the anniversary, nosing out his late partner’s secret life while guarding it just as secretly himself.
The stage is set with this perfectly adept structure for whatever insights Levy feels moved to give us, but you can often hear his writing brain clank into gear, especially in Marc’s chitchats with a handsome French designer (120 BPM’s Arnaud Valois) he’s drawn to on the rebound. Negga, meanwhile, flings herself around erratically as a self-described “hot mess” of a person (she also calls herself “a lot”) who pretends she’s in control of being single, when we suspect she’s been dumped (by the UK Hamilton no less, Jamael Westman).
Better is Patel, an oasis of quiet yearning as a gay best friend who briefly dated Marc 15 years earlier, and hasn’t got over him. His natural way with the dialogue shows up all the weakest scenes, which simply lack him in them: it’s fast becoming clear that he’s a rock-solid asset in films.
Levy does well in his own role, and has promising instincts for how to let tones intermingle – take Kaitlyn Dever’s cameo at the funeral as a vapid actress in a sexy little black dress, followed by David Bradley’s restrained oration as Oliver’s dad. Celia Imrie, meanwhile, has one smashing late scene as the couple’s business manager. Good Grief’s main problem? The splashy decor – absolutely dripping with all that money you’ve been paying Netflix – pulls focus from its pathos: at least the Schitt’s Creek brigade got to learn the meaning of money worries.
On Netflix now
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