The Good Mother

Grade: C

The Good Mother is the dimmest movie of the year, to the point where I wondered if something was wrong with the projection. When the daytime scenes happened, which I always looked forward to, I was left with a lazy, forgettable TV movie. Or not one of the best episodes of Law and Order. The Good Mother is a 90 minute suspense/crime thriller starring Hilary Swank, Olivia Cooke (Sound of Metal, Thoroughbreds), Jack Reynor (Midsommar), and Hopper Penn (Sean Penn and Robin Wright’s son). How could you go wrong with all that? Somehow, they manage to.

Swank plays Marissa, a journalist. Single, and we assume widowed, based on the rumblings throughout the screenplay of “Frank” this, “Frank” that, and “when Frank died.” One day, she is interrupted at work by her police officer son Toby (Reynor) to inform her that Toby’s brother, Marissa’s other (estranged addict) son, was killed late at night in a mysterious drive-by shooting. This is one of the few interesting scenes in the film, as we don’t hear the dialogue, and only see the exchange through glass. She barely seems fazed by the news, and it’s as if she didn’t know the person, and is just there to comfort Toby.

He left behind a pregnant girlfriend – Paige, played by the marvelous Olivia Cooke, but this is not the thing to see her in, even when the lighting allows it. There are people after her. They’re mutual dealer “friends.” And down the rabbit hole of crime drama procedures we go. You know the drill. “Let’s go to this place, and talk to this guy. He might know something. Maybe he was there that night.” Meanwhile, characters barely ever raise their voice, and often mumble. The diction throughout The Good Mother is frequently problematic.

I did eventually get on board. By the time I got invested in the story (when my eyes adjusted to the darkness, as it were), what I was left with was an unsatisfying, too passive ending. A character never gets what they deserve, to put it mildly. That doesn’t always happen in life, so maybe the filmmakers were going for realism, but either way – The Good Mother is dull and dim, in more ways than one.

Grade: C