As a film that is all about a hiking trip, Good One invites comparison with Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy that I so loved. I didn’t much care for it at first. It felt that there was little hiking compared to everything else, sitting around a campfire, by the river, in the car. But of course I’m a clueless guy just like the two men on the trip with the lone girl and missed the character dynamics until the issue was shoved straight into my face. This was the directorial debut of India Donaldson and I do still think the pacing issues are real. But it brilliantly dissects how men are sometimes blind to everything but their own problems.

Sam, a lesbian girl who is about to go to college, is joining her father, Chris, her father’s friend Matt and Matt’s son Dylan on a camping trip to the Catskills. When they stop to pick up Dylan however he refuses to go, upset about his parents’ recent divorce. The three of them go on and the ensuing conversation reveals that Chris too has divorced Sam’s mother but has remarried and now has a newborn child with her. At the hotel, she is briefly disappointed that she has to share a room with two men but makes do and sleeps on the floor. At the trailhead, Chris complains about Matt overloading his pack with unnecessary items and berates everyone for not taking the hike as seriously as he does. Matt in turn is preoccupied with the disappointments of his own life and comments about how they should make more trips together even though everyone knows how unlikely that is. Neither notice that Sam is on her period and she quietly does all of the cooking for the group. When they make camp, a group of three other men comes to pitch their tents nearby. The close proximity is of some concern to Cassie but her father dismisses her fears. Her only source of comfort is calling her girlfriend back home when her phone has reception.

The dialogue is understated and mundane, which I ordinarily like, but it also seemingly never leads to anywhere interesting. I got that both men were in their own heads and not really connecting to one another, let alone Sam, but that didn’t seem like a terribly insightful point to make. It would be too much of a spoiler to state what happens to change my mind. Suffice to say that as Matt absolves himself of blame for the divorce even though he messed around with a junior colleague, he does something he really shouldn’t have. What’s worse is that when Sam relates the incident to her father, it’s like it doesn’t even register to his mind. It’s ironic that both men praise her for being mature and wise beyond her years but fail utterly to take heed to what she is saying or notice her own troubles. This is of course depressingly typical behavior for older men and as an older man myself, it took way too long for me to notice the pattern. What isn’t said in the dialogue is just as important as what is said, something that was true in Old Joy as well, so much so that I suspect Donaldson might have made a study of the Reichardt film.

That said, I do feel that she doesn’t have the pacing of the film down. The longest and most important scenes are when they stop to camp for the night and sit around the fire. Some of these shots are very long and there’s no sense of dynamism or energy in them at all. The shots of the group actually hiking look nice enough but the director seems to struggle in integrating them into what it is she actually wants to say. This gives the impression that she just wants the hiking scenes to be done with as quickly as possible. The ratio of hiking to camping that we get here is just way off and a better director would have found a way to use the hike itself to better effect.

I underestimated the cleverness of this film and how much of a difference seeing through the perspective of a young woman makes. Sam is a well-written character. She has an instinctive, female deferrence to the two older men but at the same time, there’s only so much shit that she is willing to put up from them. The two men never really even understand what it is she is upset about, which is both upsetting and plausible. Yet I would judge that this film is better in its conception and writing than in its execution. Donaldson has great ideas but isn’t quite good enough as a director to get them right on film yet.