Film review: Good Grief
I recently watched Dan Levy’s new film, Good Grief (streaming on Netflix), which I had been anticipating for some time. Good Grief is about an artist named Marc, depicted by Levy, whose husband dies.
In their grief, Marc and his friends enter into a soul-searching journey that is far removed from your typical healing narrative; instead of encountering relief, clean resolution, or an excess of healing-related tropes, the circumstances of Marc’s loss become more complicated, and the truth becomes even more difficult to sit with. Watching the characters move through the consequences of this truth is so refreshing. To me, the film depicts a subtle and humanized example of how one man discovers how vital honesty is in the grieving process.
This won’t be a formal film review, because that’s not a style of writing I’m familiar with, so I won’t try to replicate that. Instead, I’d like to unpack three of the moments from the film that I found most touching, from my perspective both as a therapist who works alongside those in grief, and someone who is deeply familiar with loss.
Sociocultural norms around grief are of interest to me, because they can dictate how we’re received by our peers and loved ones when we’re grieving. So, many of my favourite scenes from the film depict moments in which the characters chose to step aside from those norms, demonstrating a willingness to be with grief rather than avoid it. I’ll try to touch on this as I share my thoughts.
Note: There may be mild spoilers ahead.
In this scene, Marc’s financial advisor pauses the money talk, takes off her glasses, and offers an uncharacteristically candid and open-hearted monologue about her own grief. This scene reminds me of what can be a touchstone of real-life grief experiences: When someone sheds their typical, neutral, or professional role in relation to you in order to offer compassion or tactful, gentle advice. These moments are rare, but they can imprint themselves on your heart indelibly.
She says:
“I trust you’re not running away. From him, I mean. My wife died 12 years ago this month. I ran, from her. From us. Physiology has a clever way of protecting us from what we perceive as a threat to our bodies. Which is why the more we close ourselves off, the less we feel. At the time, that benefited me, I got on with it. Went back to school. Studied finance. Built up a successful business. Nice house. Good clothes. Never having desired anyone else. And you can survive that way. Until the usualness of it all starts creeping in. And the new life you’d built as a refuge begins to feel like a void. Because, as it turns out, to avoid sadness is also to avoid love. That hindsight is a discomfort that you will forever mistake for indigestion.”
One of my early grief memories was when I was working a very busy shift as a waitress back in my home city. It was the holiday season, we were slammed, and I was barely functioning. Then, my old basketball coach came in and sat in my section with his family. He had always been tough. No time for tears or excuses. However, he must have seen how much I was struggling because he stepped away from his party, came over to me, and offered his condolences. When I started to cry right there on the restaurant floor (grief-knowers understand how often and how quickly you can find yourself crying publicly at inconvenient times), he simply looked at me and said, I don’t know how you’re here right now. He placed a hand on my shoulder, shared some words of admiration for my dad, and stayed for another moment or so. Somehow, this acknowledgement of the immense struggle of working a busy restaurant shift while actively grieving gave me resolve. That has stayed with me since.
In this scene, Marc is spending time with a new friend who appears to want to get to know him better. My interpretation is that Marc is feeling vulnerable about the idea of sharing his grief openly. I wondered if he was thinking, how much do I share? How much is too much, too soon? Can he tell how broken I feel inside?
I have found that interacting with the world during grief can put us in the position where it is difficult to be honest with others. The world is so often ignorant to the truths of grief, so baring those truths for others to see may feel like we’re opening ourselves up to scrutiny or judgement about our condition or our emotional state. We may feel as though we could be dismissed for being too emotional, or perhaps not emotional enough. We may fear we could lose a job we rely on. We may worry that we’ll upset someone else with our tears, or that they’re unprepared to see our face twist up in unimaginable pain. We may be confused about our own grief, unable to understand why it doesn’t feel like we expected. So, we may tell untruths instead; I’m fine, really. I’m just going through the process. I’m doing OK at work. In this moment, Marc is more outwardly honest than he’s been for the entire film. Their dialogue goes like this:
Friend: “I just told you something truthful. Now it’s your turn to tell me something that’s not a lie. I’ll try not to judge.”
Marc: “I feel like I abandoned my mom when I met my husband. Like I chose a distraction over sitting alone with her death or something. Didn’t take the time to grieve… or, live with the reality that she’s gone. I didn’t do that. I opted out. I stopped painting, I avoided things that would remind me of her, even though all I want is to be reminded of her. And I can feel myself doing the same thing with Oliver. I agreed to an open marriage out of fear, not trust. He asked, and the idea of giving him a reason to leave felt scarier than keeping him happy so that’s what I did. There were rules … but he broke those rules. And I can … I can feel myself choosing anger to distract from … from how much I miss him. All I want is to be able to have that fight with him.”
Friend: “You should start painting again.”
I love this scene because it depicts a character’s willingness to draw out (some) of the honesty of Marc’s grief, and at the same time, depicts Marc’s willingness for this to be seen by another. You can feel the shame dissipating when Marc tells the other character just how messy it really is. Cheekily, the friend offers unsolicited advice to start painting again, as part of an ongoing joke they’re sharing. The tension is broken and Marc’s truth is allowed to exist without shame.
In this scene, Marc is on a ferris wheel with his closest friends in Paris. The ferris wheel shows up a lot throughout the film, and I wondered why it was chosen as a symbol. Perhaps because grief has a way of feeling cyclical. Here, though, the friends are ‘forced’ to sit in the pod together, to look right at each other, sober, without distraction, going around and around and unable to get off even when the conversation moves into difficult territory. As a viewer, you realize that three friends who have spent almost every moment together through Marc’s year of grief, have failed to be truthful with one another about how they really feel, what they’re each really going through. The issues, as they appear on the outside, have not been expressed in depth. They’re dealing with grief, a breakup, and loneliness, but they haven’t allowed each other to understand what those experiences have actually been like, and how messy they actually are. One of the friends says this, which encourages more honesty to come forth:
Sophie: “People feel things that are inconvenient, Thomas. It happens. It sucks, but it happens. That’s okay.”
Sophie’s words allow for some ‘inconvenient’ feelings to be expressed. It’s interesting to me to place this scene next to the previous one I highlighted, where honesty seemed easier with a complete stranger than it did with a close trio of friends. I’ve personally experienced how words and feelings become censored in the aftermath of grief in the interest of protecting those you love from any perceived inconvenience contained within your heart. In places that could be open, raw, and true, we might find ourselves quieter than ever, unable to look at what hurts, unable to allow others to see what we feel. We might worry that they have enough to deal with, or that they’re unequipped for how messy we feel inside, or that we shouldn’t feel the way we feel. It takes courage for Sophie to say these words, to confront a truth they’ve all been avoiding, and to create space for honesty, even knowing that the consequences of that honesty might be inconvenient or painful.
To me, Good Grief is a film about emotional honesty; what happens when we avoid it, and what can flourish when we choose not to. I hope that my fellow grief-knowers can find honesty within themselves, and also find themselves with people who are willing to know what’s true about grief.
