If Daniel Levy’s popular show ‘Schitt’s Creek’ made a compelling case of banking on goodness from unlikely places, his debut feature film extends that thought
There is a certain template for grief in cinema. The crushing attribute of the emotion — impossible to fathom in real life — lends itself to familiar rendering in fiction: time is wound up in a coil and isolation fills the frame. There is hurt and betrayal and both of this is portrayed through a self-serving protagonist who chooses to lash out at the world because they can. Because they have been dealt with the most cruel blow of being left behind. British comedian Ricky Gervais outlined this with affecting sincerity in his Netflix series, After Life. The show centered on a cantankerous widower whose life is upended once his wife passes away. Across three seasons, the narrative mimicked his rudderless state by not really moving forward till much later.
Daniel Levy’s Good Grief, his directorial feature on grief and grieving, is anything but that. The premise is almost similar. At the end of a dreamy Christmas dinner attended by friends and family, Oliver (Luke Evans) bids his partner Marc Dreyfus (Levy) goodbye at the door. He is an author of a successful book franchise and has to be in Paris the next day to meet his fans. It takes a minute for everything to fall apart. His cab meets with an accident as a horrified Marc looks through the window and stares at the fate of being the one left behind.
An alternative representation
For a film so evidently on loss, time hardly stands still in Good Grief. Months pass with nimble agility, so do seasons. Marc is never alone. His close friends, Sophie (Ruth Negga) and Thomas (Himesh Patel; also his former lover), offer him company and compassion. They talk to each other with empathy and kindness, prefacing pointed observations with, “I appreciate you,” like they all go to collective therapy. Everything in the film is so picturesque that Levy’s debut feature unfolds with an invitation for us to step in. The visual interface does not alter even when the narrative takes a slight turn. Oliver and Marc had an open arrangement but the former might have flouted the rules. He had another lover and was planning to end the marriage. Marc comes to know of this a year after Oliver’s death.
On the surface, such a revelation threatens to ruin the palette. But the film promptly shifts to Paris, making the outing even more visually appealing. It all makes sense soon. With Good Grief, Levy is not just challenging the normative depiction of grief but offering an alternative representation of it. The implication here is that of a rejoinder, with the director and writer (Levy is credited for both) stating that grief can survive, and even thrive, amidst manicured surfaces. That, if one probes a little, a broken heart might emerge from the unlikeliest of faces. And if one looks closely, a pair of weepy eyes might stare back from a giant Ferris wheel in Paris.
Devastating, but also insulating
This is not to say that the actor dismantles the grammar of loss. If anything, he expands it. The outing not just focuses on Marc, the one who is lost, but also on others who are equally susceptible to loss even if the camera is not on them. During its runtime, Good Grief underlines a crucial observation, critical in its objectivity: grief might be devastating but it is also insulating. It might remind one of how selflessly they loved (Marc was the illustrator of Oliver’s books) but it makes one selfish in return.
As days turn into months and months into a year, the lives of people around Marc change. Sophie goes through a breakup and Thomas breaks down in a moment of self-pity. Because of what he has gone through, Marc behaves like a protagonist in his head. He takes his friends to Paris for his own selfish reason but convinces them that it is a return gift for their kindness. He goes to a karaoke bar with Sophie and Thomas and saunters outside, leaving his friends with strangers. To him, the act makes sense because he has accrued a loss big enough to justify that.
A gentle exposition of the merit of grief
To Levy’s credit, the writing is perceptive enough to see through this but the tone is always light, delightfully funny and sad at all times. When Marc comes back after his midnight rendezvous, he is met with a furious Thomas asking him why he left. The tirade veers from concern to indignation. He starts off with where Marc had been all night and quickly moves on to why he was left behind to foot the extravagant bill at the pub. The moment holds a mirror to Marc’s self-absorbed inclination but it plays out with such grace that it never becomes accusatory.
In fact, the film is designed with the familiar Daniel Levy’s school of grace. If his staggeringly popular show Schitt's Creek made a compelling case of banking on goodness from the most improbable of sources, his film extends that thought. At its heart, Good Grief is a gentle exposition of the merit of grief. This is why his characters, brittle and fragile in loss, never lash out. As the film unfolds, we are told that Marc had taken all his grief from his mother’s passing and put it into his marriage. He had done everything to not grieve and he had started with love.
He even gave up painting because it reminded him of his mother. For a long time, he tried doing the same after Oliver’s loss. He held anger and betrayal as a shield to not deal with it, realizing only later that to not grieve fully is to not love fully. When Marc takes the hurt from Oliver’s passing and keeps, it helps him find himself and reckon with a curious possibility: the goodness of grief. After all, losing someone might be depleting but accepting that loss is replenishing. A tree can sprout only from bare soil.
