Hilary Swank has pretty much done it all in her career. She’s won two Academy Awards, been in successful television shows, Beverly Hills 90210, and been in big franchises like The Karate Kid. She was hard-pressed to have done something new in her career. Well, I’ve found something new and it’s a grieving mother in The Good Mother.

Marissa  Bennings (Hilary Swank) is a grieving mother of a deceased son who was shot in a drive-by shooting in Albany, New York. Where she lives and works as a reporter for the Times Union. She was just doing fine before her star athlete son, Michael, got hooked on opioids for his arm/shoulder injury while playing the sport he loved, baseball. This made her spiral down into drinking and being somber and sulking around the house and town wondering what she could have done to help him.

Paige (Olivia Cooke) was the girlfriend and soon-to-be mother of Swanks character’s son. On an accidental meeting, they get into an altercation but eventually make up and come to the conclusion they need each other more than ever. They start working together to try and solve this murder any way they can. They get the help from Swank’s character’s other son Tobey (Jack Raynor), a police officer on the Albany PD.

This film has a strange way of telling its story. It uses flashbacks as well as reenactments at some points to give information to the viewer. The biggest thing besides a linear storyline is that the movie uses text messages on screen between characters and a voice-mail before the death of Swank’s character’s son. These provide a lot of backstory for the character and the storyline going forward. Which is good in that aspect.

Despite all the various ways the director Miles Joris-Pyrafitte and his co-writer Madison Harrison try to tell this story and give a certain point of view of the main character they fail to make her all that engaging or interesting. She drinks a lot to drown her sorrows and once in a while shows she might care about what’s going on around her involving her two sons and the mother of her grandchild. In better hands, this could be a good film. Instead, it drags and is mostly boring.

The one aspect of the movie I found remotely interesting was the score also by the director/ writer. The score is moody and suspenseful at all the right moments while being deeper and emotional in other scenes. It’s a shame such a great score is wasted on a film that doesn’t care about itself. It’s just not a good movie and I could see that from the very beginning. 

The movie has a fantastic cast. As I mentioned, Swank has done great work in the past and Cooke and Raynor have shined in various roles in their careers. They are just going through the numbers in this film. They seem like they are bored being involved in this movie from my point of view. That’s sad because other actors would give anything to have these roles opposite Swank.

The Good Mother isn’t that good. With the cast of Swank, Cooke and Raynor you’d think it would be but it’s very slow and rather boring. The story is interesting but loses its way in the pacing of the film. The best part of the movie is its score and that gets wasted in the overall telling and direction of the film. This story and film would have been better in other hands. It’s sad for me to say this as it seems like this was a passion project for Joris- Peyrafitte.

2 stars

Dan Skip Allen