Michael Keaton Shines in ‘Goodrich’—A Heartfelt Comeback for Real Men on Screen

One of the things I like best about watching Michael Keaton on the screen in movies, good or bad (and especially in human and often hilarious comedies like Goodrich), is the rare and gratifying skill set he shows us in his acting. He’s a master of the kind of uniquely personal leading-man character filmmakers no longer have much interest in—a real-as-breathing combination of calloused toughness and warm sensitivity many stage actors work to perfect but few film actors get the chance to try. Men on the screen are expected to cohere to the kind of one-dimensional masculine clichés moviegoers applaud—the two-fisted graduates of the Nautilus School of Dramatic Art that keep muscles toned and brains safe from any activity that might challenge the IQ. 

Both the male and female personality traits all men have—but most men hide, disguise or camouflage—used to be attractively personified on the screen by actors as diverse as Van Johnson and Robert Walker (and, to some extent, by Glenn Ford, Paul Newman and Cary Grant) in roles Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne could never play. From Batman to 007 and an endless parade of assorted spies and secret agents who blow up cars and slap women around, three-dimensional male characters today seldom exist beyond the pages of Marvel Comics. A man who can cry? Screenwriters don’t know how to write one, and actors can’t play them. In the movies, real men don’t exist. That’s where Michael Keaton comes in.

In Goodrich, he plays Andy, the high-profile owner of a struggling boutique art gallery in Los Angeles, so caught up in the distractions of business and the demands of social life that he has unwisely forgotten to share himself with the people who love him. When his wife phones him in the middle of the night to inform him she’s checked into a 90-day rehab to treat her addiction to drugs, an illness he didn’t even know about, he freaks out, then drives to the posh, expensive hospital for distinguished addicts he’s paying for without knowing it, and discovers she’s also left him. Suddenly, after ignoring everything about parenting throughout two marriages, he finds himself in the awkward, terrifying position of taking on the responsibility of raising a pair of nine-year-old twins, first feeding his son Chinese takeout, which the boy is allergic to, then facing an unsympathetic blank wall when he turns for help to his estranged, pregnant, 36-year-old daughter Gracie (a wonderful Mila Kunis), who has her own problems. On top of that, the art gallery that keeps them all afloat is suddenly facing bankruptcy. Balancing stress, juggling his mounting responsibilities, and finding himself gobsmacked in his new role of father to multiple-age children, Goodrich faces disaster at every turn, with results both harrowing and fraught with tenderness and compassion. There’s one very funny scene in which Goodrich stays home at a great cost to his business and, in an attempt to be a better person, agrees to watch a movie with them, then labors to explain Casablanca.  

There’s no way to avoid the resemblances of this film to one of Keaton’s biggest past successes, Mr. Mom, but it’s consistently more intelligent and original.  This is due in no small part to the writing and direction of Hallie Meyers-Shyer, the daughter of Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer, the innovational husband-wife team responsible for such memorable and enduring comedy classics as Private Benjamin and Baby Boom. The skills she’s learned from her parents are refreshing and numerous. But it is Michael Keaton who keeps the film balanced and beautifully timed, his face so full of emotion and feeling that he lets you know what he’s thinking even without words. The film matches his charm with an abundance of charms of its own, exploring a lot of characters without ever straining credulity, all played by a superb supporting cast that includes Andie MacDowell as the first Mrs. Goodrich, Carmen Ejogo as a customer who almost saves the gallery from its inevitable demise, Keven Pollak as the business partner who succumbs to the demands of financial logic, Michael Urie as a divorced gay man with a terminally ill child of his own, and Laura Benanti as the new and hopelessly despondent wife in rehab. Each one is diagrammed just enough that you get to know them about them without overstaying their welcome. Some support Goodrich, others disappoint him, and one even ruins his business but never stops smiling—but none leave him untouched.  Or you. By the time Frank Sinatra sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,”  you’ll be hard to suppress a tear yourself.