.jpg)
The Good Guy
Written and directed by Julio DiPietro
Starring Alexis Bledel, Scott Porter, Bryan Greenberg, and Andrew McCarthy
By Mary Lyn Maiscott
Alexis Bledel is so sweetly pretty that you might allow her anything, and perhaps that’s what the director of this movie, Julio DePietro, did. Placidity—even interrupted by a few tears and some unconvincing pseudo-Sex-and-the-City girlfriending (a communal-Brazilian-wax scene? Really?)—does not a compelling character make. (I found this also with the ingénue in the 2007 movie Life in Flight, which I recently caught on one of the movie channels. Calling Amanda Seyfried!)
Bledel’s Beth Vest has an important job—urban conservationist—but it doesn’t get much play in the film, and it doesn’t help that Beth’s friends are shallow, despite having a book club, as well as annoying. The men fare better, with Scott Porter (Friday Night Lights) playing a hotshot Wall Streeter named Tommy, who’s seeing Beth, and Bryan Greenberg his unsophisticated protégé, Daniel, who wishes he were seeing Beth (I told you she’s pretty). Tommy, by the way, has his own even shallower and more annoying work gaggle—they’re not just irritating, they’re boors (undoubtedly with bonuses). So which one—Tommy or Daniel—gives the movie its title? It takes Beth a while to figure it out, and it may you too. The director could have surprised us more than he does with this tale, but it just might do until Wall Street 2’s Michael Douglas re-emerges as, according to Vanity Fair, a—huh?—good guy.
