All Good Things is a film that will resonate with Houston audiences since the plot revolves around the Robert Durst murder of his neighbor in Galveston about a decade ago.
All Good Things director Andrew Jarecki spoke about his movie by phone with Free Press Houston. Previously, Jarecki was one of the founders of Moviefone and his first film was the acclaimed docu Capturing the Friedmans. AGT also deals with a dysfunctional family but this time in a fictionalized manner. Robert Durst, a scion of New York City real estate mogul Seymour Durst, becomes David Marks in a thoughtful and frankly exciting performance by Ryan Gosling. Gosling’s joined in equal measure by Kirsten Dunst and Frank Langella. The story spans from the early 1970s to the present, from NYC to Texas and a few points in between. The crux of the film is the disappearance of Marks’ wife soon after their marriage and the subsequent events that found him living as a transvestite in Galveston a generation later.
“I worked with a theory that someone filled in as his wife leaving her apartment, taking a taxi after he murdered her to establish an alibi,” said Jerecki. There was no indictment and years later a friend of the couple Susan Berman (the character Deborah Lehrman in the movie) was also murdered. “There’s a tendency to make a monster out of such a character that I wanted to avoid,” mentioned Jarecki. Durst was suspected in both cases but never charged. However Durst was charged in the death of his neighbor Morris Black (the character Malvern Bump in the movie) after Black’s dismembered body “washed up in Galveston Bay.”
Durst was acquitted on grounds of self-defense although he was sentenced to several months incarceration for improper disposal of a body. Jarecki adds that before Durst was arrested he took off on a cross-country journey and was even “busted for shoplifting a sandwich at a store in Pennsylvania even though he was flush with cash.” Jarecki shot the film at New York City locales with Connecticut filling in for the Gulf Coast scenes. All Good Things (the title refers to a health food store that Marks and his wife run early in the movie) opens this weekend at the Alamo Drafthouse in Katy.
- Michael Bergeron