Andy Goodrich (Michael Keaton) is the kind of well-off Los Angeleno who can leave his personal obligations for someone else to handle. He owns a boutique art gallery, sleeps in a spacious home where he serves thirty-one-year-old whiskey to guests, and has a housekeeper/babysitter who mostly looks after his two young twin children. So you can imagine his shock when, in the middle of the night, during the film's opening scene, he receives a call from his wife Naomie (Laura Benanti) to inform him that she isn't sleeping beside him in bed. She has just entered a rehab center for a prescription drug addiction that he didn't know anything about. Actually, nevermind. None of us can imagine that shock.
You'd think that kind of off-putting wealth would immediately make the late-life crisis depicted in "Goodrich" too much to stomach. But writer/director Hallie Meyers-Shyer's comedy is heavy enough on the schmaltz to cast a bubbly spell that is downright endearing.
In her follow-up to the awe-shucks Reese Witherspoon rom-com "Home Again," a film similarly led by a character grappling with upheaval in their personal life, Meyers-Shyer sets plenty of parts in motion. Andy, as you can guess, is a terrible husband and father. With Naomie gone for ninety days — roughly the span of the film — he finally learns about his nine-year-old kids: the quiet Mose (Jacob Kopera) and the precocious Billie (Vivien Lyra Blair). As he keeps the truth about their mother's rehab away from them, Goodrich actively attends student-teacher conferences, learns their allergies, and has movie nights. He also forms a close friendship with Pete (Michael Urie), the gay father of the kids' epileptic classmate. Meanwhile, Grace (Mila Kunis), his pregnant daughter from his first marriage, wistfully looks on as Andy becomes the kind of father he still isn't with her.
Andy has spent the majority of his life ignoring his family. Instead, he dedicates his time to his art gallery, which is now struggling so badly that it's nearing foreclosure. His best hope is to snag the estate of a recently deceased artist by impressing her daughter (Carmen Ejogo). Bills pile up for the gallery, his kids' private school beckons, and his housekeeper is a tad sassy. These are not the problems of the other side of the tracks. And yet, one is invested because these troubles emotionally make sense. Who would not be afraid of losing everything?
Keaton has become quite comfortable playing older men with plenty of regrets ("Knox Goes Away"), and he finds a bit more space here to realize this character. He plays Andy as the kind of weathered rascal whose likability is enough to overlook his faults. It's why his lightbulb moment of needing to be a better father, not unlike Robin Williams' epiphany in "Mrs Doubtfire," is so comforting.
Meyers-Shyer can also get away with making Andy affable because she trusts her actors. While Keaton works the frame for our attention, Kunis ably sells the disappointment that lurks underneath her character's agreeable facade. Through her internal performance, Kunis makes it understandable why her character is underwritten. Andy barely sees Grace for Grace. The same could be said of how he doesn't see Naomie or his ex-wife Anne (Andie MacDowell). Sometimes, she overplays that unknowability. How many ways can we see Andy' be aloof's aloofness without the narrative treading water? Still, these actors push enough of a pulse for us to sit through the film's inevitable turns.
There are other nicks and bruises in this relaxed comedy. The lighting is sometimes overblown. Some characters, like Pete, exist only as self-serving devices to prove Andy's affability. There's an odd IDF joke. And the score borders on being suffocatingly trite. But those wounds slide under the film's strengths: heartwarming scenes of family bonding, a deft ensemble, and an engaging sense of humor (Keaton and Kunis have an effortless rapport). Even in the film's final minutes, which features one too many big-hearted speeches, it's a difficult task not to reach for the tissues. "Goodrich" is the type of rewatchable adult-minded comedy that feels like a welcome sight.
