Michael Keaton’s Goodrich is a bittersweet and beautiful screen outing

Goodrich shows its star Michael Keaton’s range as a husband, father and businessman shocked out of complacency into reality.

Stephen Romei

MIchael Keaton’s Andy in Goodrich, with Mose (Jacob Kopera), left and Billie (Vivien Lyra Blair).

2 min read

12:00AMNovember 22, 2024

“If life isn’t kicking your ass it’s not doing its job.” So says 60-year-old Los Angeles art dealer Andy Goodrich (Michael Keaton) in the bittersweet multi-generational drama Goodrich.

He’s talking to Grace (Mila Kunis), his daughter from his first marriage, who is 36 and heavily pregnant with her first child. He’s speaking in the present tense as he’s in a midlife crisis he did not see coming.

He and Grace are distant, his art gallery is financially failing and his second wife, Naomi (Laura Benanti), with whom he has nine-year-old twins, has booked herself into a drug rehabilitation clinic and told him she is leaving the marriage. The point is that while Andy did not see any of this coming everyone else did. Immersed in the art world day and night, he did not properly see his loved ones. Preparing dinner as a suddenly single parent, for example, he does not remember that his son is allergic to nuts.

Grace describes the past 30 years of her life as “a steady stream of mad with spurts of liking you in-between’’. Naomi tells him, “We live separate lives and I am invisible.”

Even the kids, Billie (Vivien Lyra Blair) and Mose (Jacob Kopera), knew their mother was addicted to prescription drugs. His business partner (Kevin Pollak) reminds him he repeatedly warned the gallery was struggling to pay its bills.

“Who doesn’t know their wife is addicted to drugs?’’ Andy asks himself. “Am I in denial? Am I just dumb?” He jokes that he has to work to “support the generations of children who hate me”, but he knows he is in the wrong.

This movie is the second feature of American filmmaker Hallie Meyers-Shyer, following her 2017 debut Home Again, a romantic comedy starring Reese Witherspoon.

Rosie (Eden Grace Redfield), Austen (Michael Sheen) and Alice (Reese Witherspoon) in a scene from Home Again, directed by Hallie Meyers-Shyer.

With the set-up, the director could go down the comedy-drama path of Keaton’s 1983 Mr Mom: an out-of-touch dad forced to full-time parent his nine-year-olds and reconcile with their pregnant half-sister. She doesn’t and what unfolds is far more poignant as a result.

Keaton is impressive in the lead role. The fact Andy quickly realises and admits to his mistakes makes him a far more emotionally interesting character because he — and we — know that it’s what he does next, addressing the now as he self-reflects on the then, that will matter most. He caused the ruptures and now he has a chance to make the repairs.

There are beautiful moments when he decides to be honest with his children, such as when his son asks how he, with an ex-wife (Andie MacDowell in a cameo), wife and two daughters, deals with “so many girls in his life”.

“Not very well, my friend,’’ he tells his son. “Not very well.”

The director avoids over-sentimental moments, which are always a risk in this sort of movie. This is a thoughtful, heartfelt, grown-up movie about people dealing with that ass-kicker, as Andy describes it, known as life.