‘The Good Half’ Review: Nick Jonas Leads Robert Schwartzman’s Uneven Grief Drama

There’s a scene early in Robert Schwartzman’s The Good Half that encapsulates why the film, despite its good intentions, struggles to work. Renn (Nick Jonas), a 28-year-old writer based in Los Angeles, has returned to Cleveland for his mother’s funeral. He’s standing in the kitchen of his father’s home (his parents were divorced) when his dad, Darren, (Matt Walsh) stumbles upon him looking for a drink. They pour each other some tequila and get down to the awkward business of confronting their emotions. 

Darren is the kind of father who runs to the internet for answers. He’s searched the web for tips on how to console loved ones in the wake of a loss and repeats the generic lessons verbatim. “I feel like I’m failing you,” Darren says when he realizes the clichés aren’t helping his son. “I feel like I should be quoting Thoreau.” 

“The woods guy?” Renn says, confused. 

Now, we don’t know much about Renn or his relationship to Darren at this point in the film. But we do know that the young man has a passion for writing, that he won short story prizes in school (as evidenced by various ephemera in his childhood room) and that his mother urged him to never give up on his creative ambitions. Writing is clearly of great importance to Renn, although the kind he does is only vaguely gestured at. So it’s tough to imagine that he would refer to Thoreau as “the woods guy,” a descriptor that, at best, implies a puzzling lack of recognition. 

This issue isn’t exclusive to Renn. Many of the characters in The Good Half act in ways that don’t always make sense. Part of this is by design: The film, written by Brett Ryland, is about grief and all its peculiarities, how the experience contorts daily life, cleaving one’s existence into two parts — the years before a loss and the years after. It’s expected that these people, reeling from the death of their matriarch (an underused Elisabeth Shue in flashbacks), aren’t always legible. But it’s harder to excuse how shallow they feel, which creates a friction within the film and makes it harder to submit to its sentimentalism.  

The Good Half opens with Renn on a flight to Cleveland, where he meets Zoey (Alexandra Shipp), a therapist on her way to a professional conference in the area. She’s afraid of flying, so she stretches their conversations with pointed questions and clever comments to distract herself. The predictable trajectory of their relationship — later, Renn will find in Zoey a reliable confidante — would be easier to bear if either of them felt convincing as characters. But we don’t spend enough time with Zoey here, or later in the film, to understand her or her motivations. Her interactions with Renn feel too mechanical, and it’s hard to believe their relationship as anything more than a plot device.   

The film feels looser and more authentic when Renn reunites with his family and joins the funeral-planning efforts. His sister, Leigh (Brittany Snow), has already started mapping out the service with their mother’s ex-husband, Rick (David Arquette). Renn and Leigh have a frosty relationship instigated by their mother’s favoritism and exacerbated by Renn’s evasiveness. He avoids his sister’s calls and rarely visited when their mother underwent aggressive cancer treatment in the hospital. Leigh chastises her brother for his jokes, which he strategically uses to squash any real sentiment. The siblings drive around town completing various to-do items, each of which clarifies their relationship to grief.

Through a series of sharp set pieces — shopping for a casket, cobbling together a eulogy with a priest (Stephen Park), organizing their mother’s closet — Ryland highlights the strangeness and inherent humor in death’s rituals. There’s a charming quality to these scenes, which are buoyed by the cast’s keen comedic timing. (Jonas, whose performance wobbles at other moments, holds his own here.)

It’s disappointing when The Good Half undercuts its own momentum. Jagged transitions and an overuse of slow-motion, needle-drop moments contribute to the overall unevenness. Time that could have been spent further detailing these characters, fleshing out their motivations and exploring the emotional ambiguities and ambivalences provoked by grief is devoted to distracting filler moments. There’s a limit to the number of times we want to see Renn, wearing a severe pout, walking across a room while a melancholic pop tune plays in the background.

Those scenes, with their music-video like triteness, too frequently interrupt critical moments of character development. Just when we might begin to understand Leigh as more than Renn’s foil or Zoey as more than just a convenient love interest, we find ourselves cut off, subjected to more forced sentimentality. The cumulative effect is one of distancing us from these people and their problems, making it difficult to sincerely connect with The Good Half.