A wealthy real-estate heir falls into criminal activity. WithRyan Gosling,Kirsten Dunst. Director:Andrew Jarecki(1:40). R: Violence, language, nudity. At theParisand Angelika.
A true-crime tale can be its own worst enemy, damned to a mix of half-constructed facts and odd conjecture, but even with that in mind,"All Good Things"suffers from an unusual dilemma: The truth it's working from really is stranger than fiction. The film ends up wrestling itself into a corner, though it's saved by a corrosive central performance from Ryan Gosling and a disconcertingly hypnotic feel.
Director Andrew Jarecki's lightly fictionalized drama is based on the case ofRobert Durst, scion of a powerfulNew Yorkreal-estate family and subject of a parade of sensational headlines since his wife went missing in 1982. Here,Robert Marks' (Gosling) history of unsettling behavior stems from witnessing his mother kill herself when he was 7.
In 1973, the twentysomething Marks meetsKatherine McCarthy(Kirsten Dunst), a working-classLong Islandgirl in every way the opposite of the world Marks knows. After attempting to shake his past by marrying Katherine and opening a health-food store inVermont, Marks is drawn into shady business dealings by his father (a serpent-likeFrank Langella). The result is an uncorking of his demons: Marks becomes increasingly erratic and violent, while Katherine, hiding bruises under her sunglasses and shuttling between the couple's three homes, lives mostly in denial.
In the early '80s, Katherine disappears, yet her well-connected husband is never considered a suspect in the missing-persons case. Twenty years go by, and another woman is murdered -- a crime committed by Malvern Bump (Philip Baker Hall), an antisocial retiree who did the job for his neighbor Marks, by then living inGalveston,Tex., disguised as a mute ... and a woman. Only when Marks cuts up Bump's body and dumps it in a river is he arrested and put on trial.
The film tries to keep this tangled web straight, though it's often overwhelmed by simply trying to present what happened. (Durst was acquitted in a 2003 case for killing an elderly Texas neighbor, but served nearly three years on a charge of improper disposal of a body.) Still, Jarecki ("Capturing the Friedmans") and cinematographerMichael Seresinbeautifully evoke grubby disco-eraTimes Squarewith a few choice details, and work hard to give the whole movie a quietly creepy tone.
Dunst lets a vacant quality fill in for Katherine's confusion once Marks' inner switch gets turned, but it works as a nice mirror for Gosling, whose edgy manner and angular intensity is the film's anchor. He helps us stick with the movie even when it can't help but become unglued.
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