The Good Half
Directed by Robert Schwartzman
Written by Brett Ryland
Starring Nick Jonas, Brittany Snow, Alexandra Shipp, and Elisabeth Shue
Rated R
Runtime: 1 hour, 40 minutes
In theaters August 16

by Megan Robinson, Staff Writer

Grief is one of the most universal emotional processes we as a people endure. Around the globe, every society and culture deals with loss in their own way, and yet we all know the feelings, the proceedings, the seemingly never ending tears that follow. Grief’s universality has made it the subject of art for centuries, everyone trying their hand at creating something that represents what this truly feels like. Unfortunately, universality can be a bit of a curse; in the world of film, specificity is meant to create universality, but more often than not the specific is drowned out in favor of the generic. The Good Half, directed by Robert Schwartzman, certainly means well as a piece of art about loss, but the execution is completely dull, making it devoid of any emotion.

Renn (Nick Jonas) dreads the infamous phone call that anyone with a loved one in the hospital can get. When his sister Leigh (Brittany Snow) finally calls, it’s over — his mother is dead. So begins a trip back to Cleveland, Ohio to sort out the funeral for Lily (Elisabeth Shue), filled with both hiccups and delights. While Renn antagonizes his step-father Rick (David Arquette), he becomes infatuated with Zoey (Alexandra Shipp), a young therapist he meets on his plane ride home and with whom he becomes fast friends. In just a few days, Renn searches for closure, peace, and any way to keep his mother’s memory alive, at least how he remembered her.

Despite a star-studded cast, The Good Half keeps things relatively quiet and understated, leaving melodrama at the door. On the one hand, this topic doesn’t necessarily need bombast and flash; on the other, it could use anything to liven it up. Renn goes through cliche visual signifiers to represent his sadness constantly, the most predictable of which is standing motionless in the shower, head lowered, full of angst. Jonas is able to play the character with a reasonable level of believability, opting more often than not for low-key realism. Renn feels like a completely average person, but Brett Ryland’s cliched script and Jonas’ flat performance leaves the character, and his struggles, hollow.

Ryland’s script overall is the weakest aspect of this exploration of grief. While his choice to blend past and present is interesting, it’s Schwartzman’s and editor Chris Donlon’s seamless visual transitions that make it come together. The story and characters are mostly writerly cliches common in university classrooms — not egregious, but certainly amateurish. Given this is Ryland’s first film credit as a writer, this is unsurprising, and maybe credit is due that a first film has a compact, sensible script such as this, where the characters are likable and the arcs feel natural. And yet, every cliche from Renn’s dreams of being a successful writer, to Zoey as an eccentric dream girl who loves 90s action films and acts as a shoulder to cry on (not to worry, she’s also a therapist, so it’s fine that her chief purpose is listening to Renn talk), to Lily as an almost angelic mother figure with small quirks like being forgetful or a kleptomaniac, don’t just bore — they offend.

The film’s final third ups the ante a bit, and in doing so saves it from falling into obscurity. Matt Walsh is particularly a delight, not just in this final third but in any scene he’s in. His comedic sensibilities and ease with the film’s laidback tone give him the edge over the other actors, who are more often than not muting the comedic sensibilities they have to keep everything more grounded. Jonas, Snow, and Arquette have been funny before, but they’re never able to let loose. The final third gives their characters more to chew on, as bad funeral reception decorum evolves into questionable and legally dubious behavior. In the end, though, things resolve themselves neatly; it may be realistic to us, but where’s the spark of personality to really make what’s on screen unique and representative of actual human beings?

The Good Half attempts to capture what love and loss do to a small family in Cleveland, driven apart by divorce, the passage of time, and the desperate need to leave Cleveland. No matter how much it attempts to be unique, however, it never achieves a fresh perspective, or an aching pain poured out on screen. Even the film’s location is only memorable through constant namedrops, and otherwise Cleveland looks and feels about the same as any suburb in America, as if its name is invoked only to prove to the audience that this is indeed a unique location. Though the film is a watchable family drama, it’s not much more than mildly entertaining. The Good Half neither draws you in nor drives you away, leaving it a barely half good, completely competent film.