Good Pos­ture

If we are to believe that all good art comes from suf­fer­ing, it seems that the char­ac­ters in Dol­ly Wells’ well-inten­tioned but half-baked direc­to­r­i­al debut, Good Pos­ture, have let the process eclipse the prod­uct. A break up leads to a doc­u­men­tary shoot, but lit­tle tan­gi­ble emo­tion leads the way in this under­whelm­ing indie comedy.

The film begins as a chap­ter of New York teen Lilian’s life is end­ing. Lil­ian (Grace Van Pat­ten) has been liv­ing with her boyfriend, but when he dumps her she’s forced to move in with fam­i­ly friends, a cou­ple of hous­es down the street. She’s tem­porar­i­ly stay­ing with fam­i­ly friends while she waits, pos­si­bly naive­ly, for her father and his new girl­friend to move back to New York and scoop her up. Lil­ian hangs out with var­i­ous peo­ple – an ex-lover, new friends, unre­li­able role mod­els. Van Patten’s gut­sy con­vic­tion just about pads out her char­ac­ter, but it can’t com­pen­sate for the flim­sy and some­what reduc­tive design of the teenage angst on show.

Lilian’s life finds a pur­pose when she strikes up a rela­tion­ship with Julia Price, the famous and intim­i­dat­ing nov­el­ist she’s stay­ing with. It pro­gres­sive­ly (albeit pre­dictably) turns from hos­tile to ami­ca­ble, as the two women become pen pals across the hall­way. Unan­swered and often uncon­vinc­ing ques­tions start to tum­ble: is Lil­ian inspired by Julia? Is she jeal­ous? Does she crave her love because there’s no one else left, or because it’s what every­one else does?

No sin­gle thread is devel­oped far enough to make these women feel three-dimen­sion­al, as Lilian’s half-heart­ed attempt to make a film about Julia is as close to ​‘art’ as her ambi­tions get. It then makes you won­der just what hap­pened to Lil­ian in the first place – was she real­ly heart­bro­ken? Does she have a heart? Wells’ script asks smart ques­tions about female inde­pen­dence, but Lilian’s pas­sion for, well, any­thing, nev­er real­ly makes it onto the screen.