Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

Michael Keaton plays Andy Goodrich, a gallery owner who is both a good guy and a rich guy. Maybe this is nominative determinism.

Some might debate both points. Andy is so distracted by his career that he’s the only person in his life who didn’t know his wife was addicted to pills. Keaton is a singular actor, though—a guy who can play dark and brooding as well as winning personality. As directed by Hallie Meyers-Shyer (Home Again), he is very much the latter. We can’t help but root for him. As for being rich, that’s relative. I suppose the character Andy Goodrich might think of himself as “middle class.” Not from where I sit, looking at that guy’s house.

Goodrich is a solid, standard family drama, with a premise that it uses to convince itself it’s “modern.” The title character is an older man—age never stated, but if we are to assume he’s the same age as Michael Keaton, then he’s 73. He has a grown daughter, Grace, played by Mile Kunis, and Grace’s age is stated: 36. With that math, Andy would have been 37 when she was born. He also has twin childen who are only 9 years old. Andy would have then been 64 when they were born. Kunis gets an amusing line about how being 27 years older than your siblings is “pretty much unheard of. Except maybe in L.A.” Of course, this movie is set in Los Angeles.

The film opens with Andy’s call from his wife, informing him in the middle of the night that she’s checked into rehab and she’s leaving him. She trusts he can take care of the twins. People in Andy’s life sure have a lot of faith in him for a guy who’s so clueless. Even his 9-year-old daughter comments on how many pills her mom was taking. The one exception is Grace, who resents watching her dad mature in parenting the twins in ways he never did when she was their age.

Grace is also pregnant, which is a great way for the script to provide opportunities for Andy to both step up and disappoint. Goodrich is overall kind of slight as a film, but I can’t deny that I locked into it. Keaton has a singularly weird charisma even as an old man, which he knows how to calibrate in ways few other people would. I got several good chuckles out of this movie, and and it made me cry in all the spots it was clearly designed to.

I hate to pick on children, but the twins didn’t work as well for me. I’ve been spoiled in recent years by countless movies featuring child actors who are incredibly well cast and perform with a convincingly naturalistic style. I used to think kids just naturally can’t act, and then I was proved wrong. Goodrich is like a throwback to a time when weirdly precocious kids were cast in movies. I’m not blaming the kids, really; they might very well grow into some useful talent. And they’re not terrible, they’re just a little off most of the time. This is more a reflection of the direction than anything, and perhaps Meyers-Shyer is just better at directing adults than kids.

And then there’s Michael Urie, a welcome sight in a part it’s easy to be ambivalent about. He plays Terry, the divorced gay parent of a classmate of Andy’s twins, and he and Andy bond over their separations and become friends. There’s a scene where things get, let’s say, awkward between Andy and Terry. It’s both really entertaining and incongruous in the overall plot, something that makes little sense in its inclusion. At least Urie gives Terry more dimension than the script does.

There’s a couple other big names in relatively small parts, notably Kevin Pollack as Andy’s business partner, and a criminally underused Andie MacDowell in just a couple of scenes as Andy’s ex-wife, Grace’s mother. We need more movies with both of these actors in parts with more substance. And that’s not to say Goodrich doesn’t have substance—it has a fair amount—but their parts don’t particularly.

It’s Keaton and Kunis who are the heart of Goodrich, and if anything makes the movie worth seeing, it’s them. Keaton is great most of the time, but for a couple of scenes that allow his delivery to sort of trail off oddly. Kunis is lovely all of the time. There’s an overall warmth to Goodrich that just about makes up for its unevenness.

*A father-daughter dance that warms the heart. Most of the time.*

Overall: B