Marissa (Swank) wakes up to another day in Albany, New York, the camera foregrounding the tumbler of whiskey next to a half-empty bottle on her nightstand. Life hasn’t been dealing her many good cards lately. The death of her husband from a battle with an undisclosed illness still hovers over her, and her job at the Times Union newspaper has become frustratingly less about the news and more about the clickbait desperately needed to stay financially solvent (the film takes place in 2016, when that goal seemed a little less Sisyphean).
But Marissa hasn’t filed a story since her loss anyway, even though her benevolent editor Jim (Lewis) considers her the best writer he has. Of Marissa’s two sons, she still sees her eldest, Toby (Reynor), a local cop with a young wife, Gina (Dilone); but Marissa hasn’t seen her other son, Michael (Harrison), in a number of months, his heroin habit and accompanying lifestyle the point of estrangement there. And she’ll never see Michael again, because he is gunned down late one night by a passing truck as he’s running down the street in the opening moments of the film.
At her son’s funeral, Michael’s very pregnant girlfriend, Paige (Cooke), shows up, and Marissa takes her in, because someone is looking for the large stash of drugs Paige found in Michael’s closet, and Marissa needs to find out what happened to her son, never mind that Toby has already chalked it up to another drug deal gone wrong. The drug itself, a mixture of heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl, goes by the name “Mother’s Milk,” and it serves as a pretty solid MacGuffin for filmmaker Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s drama. Because while The Good Mother predominantly concerns itself with Marissa’s search for the truth about her son’s murder, Joris-Peyrafitte and co-writer Madison Harrison weave into that search needle exchanges and safe injection clinics, the impending wave of the fentanyl epidemic, and how a destructive addiction often begins with a doctor’s prescription.
Much as he did with his 2016 feature debut (at the age of 23), the love-triangle drama As You Are, Joris-Peyrafitte tells this story with welcome subtlety and a keen attenuation to his actors. Scenes often go in unexpected directions, conventional tropes are discarded or transformed into something else entirely. That is not to say the film goes off the narrative rails: The light must shine on the guilty, and Marissa must get her newshound mojo back. Yet it is the elegant nuance and vivid performances that light up The Good Mother. Whether anyone involved actually lives up to the title is left solely to you.
This article appears in September 1 • 2023.