All Good Things Review

Andrew Jarecki came to this story as a documentarian and left the instincts behind. The material is the Robert Durst case with the names changed, and the film treats it as lurid melodrama that keeps insisting on its own mystery long after the audience has worked out the answer. Kirsten Dunst is the reason to watch. Her Katie starts as a girl flattered by money and ends up rehearsing her own escape in a kitchen she knows is not safe, and the fear shows in her posture before it reaches her voice.

Gosling is precise in the early scenes and badly served later, when the makeup department glues on jowls and a wig and asks him to play a man thirty years older. Michael Seresin gives the Vermont health food shop a hazy seventies warmth that curdles convincingly once the couple move back to New York. The structure is where it falls apart.

A frame narrative of courtroom testimony chops the timeline into fragments, the Galveston chapter arrives as farce in a film that had been playing tragedy, and Frank Langella's tyrant father is written as pure menace with nothing underneath. The Weinstein Company shelved it for two years, and the recutting shows in every seam.