Unsolved crimes make for great movies. Writers and directors can take large liberties with truth to make a better story. The viewer doesn't know how much is fact and how much is fiction, but as long as there's an exciting and entertaining tale, with good acting, it doesn't make much difference. So it is with "All Good Things," based on a real, unsolved crime, which opened yesterday.
Frank Jarecki makes his fictional feature film debut in powerful style. His previous feature, the documentary "Capturing the Friedmans," was solid and well-made. Now, from an original screenplay by Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling, he goes farther afield, practically erasing the line between the genres but working from the fact that two people are dead, a third has disappeared and the presumed killer (according to Jarecki) is living in Florida.
In 1982, Kathleen McCormack Durst disappeared. She was the wife of Robert A. Durst, heir to mega-millions of dollars earned by his father, Seymour, in various real estate investments and transactions. Neither she nor a body has been found.
The movie changes names, perhaps to avoid litigation, perhaps to retain its air of fiction. Dear old, rich old Dad, played powerfully by Frank Langella, with just the right touch of the bully who uses his wealth to get his way, is Sanford Marks. The son, fine work by Ryan Gosling, is David, and the long-gone wife is Katie, a rich portrayal by Kirsten Dunst. David is not the son that Sanford wanted, nor is Katie the wife he wanted for the boy. She's not from a wealthy family, which makes her a lower-class commoner.
In one of the movie's most telling sequences, the elder Marks says, scornfully, "She'll never be one of us," and David replies, "I know. Isn't that great!"
With a nod to the hippie lifestyle, David and Katie marry, move to Vermont, open an organic grocery, All Good Things, an ironic twist for the movie's title. With money as leverage, Dad convinces David to leave the failing grocery, return to New York and work for the family company, collecting rent from the grind houses and sex shops that populated West 42nd Street at the time. After Katie's disappearance, and an investigation that shows nothing, David's behavior begins to change. He gets involved with a Los Angeles newspaper reporter, Susan Berman (Lily Rabe). When she is murdered, there's another police investigation that shows nothing. David's next stop is Galveston, where he is a practicing transvestite. He befriends a man named Morris Black, (Philip Baker Hall) whose name is changed to Malvern Bump. But despite all these plot hooks, "All Good Things" slows down, eventually running out of steam as David lives comfortably in Florida. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but sometimes fiction carries on to a more successful conclusion.
All Good Things is at the Plaza Frontenac