Review of All Good Things (2010) by Manny C — 19 Dec 2010

Presenting a movie where the names have been changed, but there's no protecting the innocent. That would be Andrew Jarecki's excellent true-crime drama All Good Things, starring Ryan Gosling as David Marks, an heir to a fortune in New York real estate. Marks became a suspect in the disappearance of his wife, Katie (Kirsten Dunst). Her body was never discovered. The case is reopened and then David, posing as a woman, takes off to Galveston, Texas, where he meets Malvern Bump (Philip Baker Hall). Later her body turns up in a bay. Then David becomes a person of interest when his longtime college friend Deborah (Lily Rabe), a journalist, is found dead in her Los Angeles home. David plead self-defense in the murder of Bump, but served three years in prison for jumping bail and tampering with evidence by dumping Bump's body. Afterwards he lives in Florida selling real estate.

If any of that sounded familiar, it's not just you. David Marks greatly resembles Robert Durst, a real estate heir with Aspergers, whose wife, Kathleen McCormack went missing in 1982. Durst was also questioned in the shooting death of his friend, Susan Berman, and in fact plead self-defense in the death of his Texas neighbor Morris Black. But speculation isn't in Jarecki's film: he explicitly implicates him in all three murders.

Jarecki is best known as a documentarian, having earned Oscar acclaim for his 2003 doc Capturing The Friedmans, about a family accused of child molestation. Jarecki is clearly fascinated by Durst, a man dismissed as nothing more than a psychotic. He and his documentary team did their own research and investigation. What results is a thrillingly provocative film that is borderline scary. The title is derived from the health food store Marks and his wife opened, and it's a disturbing title. And the cast is terrific. Gosling digs deep, he's mesmerizing. And Dunst is achingly good. Best of all is Frank Langella as Marks' father, laced with menacing charm. All Good Things has a lot of ideas going through it and sometimes threatens to fly off the rails, but it's worth every moment.