The movie All Good Things is a spell-binding love story wrapped in a true crime riddle that keeps you on the edge of your seat for 101 minutes. It is actually bio-fiction based upon one of the most notorious missing person’s case in New York state history. Add on an unsolved murder in Texas and other painful sequels involving bizarre behavior and you have the story of real estate heir Robert Durst.
All Good Things, starring Ryan Gosling (Robert Durst) and Kirsten Dunst, as the now missing and presumed dead Kathie McCormack (Durst’s young and bright wife), is a real spellbinder. Rotten Tomatoes, which I generally find extremely helpful, says in its lead review of the movie: “It's well-acted, and the true story that inspired it offers plenty of drama — which is why it's so frustrating that All Good Things is so clichéd and frustratingly ambiguous.” I did find it ambiguous but the nature of the crime, and the fact that the lead character is still alive and un-convicted of a crime, may have necessitated this choice of presentation.
The film is tense and filled with deep emotion. It rises to the level of profound complexion in presenting a real-life unsolved mystery. But it does more. It raises the very modern, and deeply unsettling issue, of the relationship between psychiatric depression and anger, rooted in witnessing a maternal suicide at age seven, and the impact this had on the life of a grown man who never found a way to gain health.
How should the law view crime when it is deeply rooted in psychiatric problems. I do not have an easy answer to that question since I am neither a trained psychiatrist nor a criminal lawyer. I have come to believe the modern context requires us to hold a place for such a category, a category which many of my conservative friends reject totally. This film raised questions like this in an intense and powerful context even though no legal appeal is ever made to the prime suspect’s mental state.
This is a 2010 film and available on DVD. As is often the case I got my own copy from the public library. I stopped using Netflix mailings last month and find that with Netflix streaming video via my Sony Playstation (no I am not a gamer, no time), the public library, Redbox and .99 cent one night rentals at Blockbuster I have all the access to films that I need.
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