ALL GOOD THINGS (2010) (***1/2)

Director Andrew Jarecki seems drawn to crime stories where the guilt of the accused is in question. He made the remarkable documentary, CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS, which told the tale of a father and his son who were both charged with child molestation. Now he steps into a fictional tale, but one based on true life. Those who watch ID or read true crime books will know this as a veiled version of the bizarre case of Robert Durst, whose wife Kathleen McCormack mysterious disappeared one day without a trace.

In this film, the "Robert Durst" character is named David Marks (Ryan Gosling, THE NOTEBOOK), the son of a wealthy land owner in NYC named Sanford Marks (Frank Langella, FROST/NIXON). Sanford wants his son to follow in the family business, which includes the ownership of strip clubs and peep shows on 42nd Street. David has other plans. The young man meets Katie (Kirsten Dunst, SPIDER-MAN) when his father is too cheap to send a plumber over to one of his buildings to check out a leaky sink. She's from a working class family, which is exactly the kind of girl that will adequately piss off his father.

They marry and moved to Connecticut where they open a health food store called All Good Things. But with daddy footing the bill, all good things must come to an end. The twosome seemed happy in New England away from the phoniness of the New York social scene. But familial pressure forces David to return and take a job at his father's company as a bagman in a suit for the firm's less reputable ventures.

Over time David becomes a different man. Katie wants children, but he refuses as if she is asking him to commit a crime for her. He becomes withdrawn. Katie tries to build her own life, going back to school to become a doctor, a dream she has always had. David begins to resent her for her ability to follow her desires. His resentment turns to violence. But his words are more cruel than his fists. Watch when he tells her she would have been a good mother. Does he even know that he's not giving her a compliment?

When Katie disappears, the film turns into a mystery of sorts. The turns that the plot takes could only be based on real life, because you'd never believe it otherwise. Key players include Deborah Lehrman (Lily Rabe, NO RESERVATIONS), a college friend of David's who knows how emotional screwed up he really is since witnessing the suicide of his mother as a child. What secrets does she hold? There is also Malvern Bump (Philip Baker Hall, MAGNOLIA), a Vietnam war vet, whose view on life is as interesting as his name.

Gosling brings complexity to David. He is a man who wanted nothing more than to be the opposite of his father. But when circumstance forces him into his father's world, it crushes his soul and leaves him a shell. Toward the end of the film, he makes bizarre moves that make one wonder if he's being truer to himself or simply as different from Sanford as humanly possible.

Dunst gives her best performance of her career. Watch as she transforms from a woman who loves and wants to protect David to someone who needs to get away from him. She brings such depth and humanity to the role that it avoids the trappings of women in danger film's like SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY. She is not simply a victim to be pitied, but a smart woman who begins to crack under the enormous weight of the unfairness that she is put in. We become angry for her and want justice. As Sanford says about her, she will never be one of them. Thank goodness for that.

This gripping thriller tells the story of a disturbed young man and the beautiful young woman who gives him peace for a time. But she wasn't enough to pull him away from his father's control. While we know her fate is doomed, we connect to her so naturally. When she married David, she knew his family was powerful, but she didn't know the extent. It's hard to fight this kind of power, because they are prepared to do anything to keep it. It reminds me of a line from SPEED. With his millions of dollars in ransom in hand, Dennis Hopper's villain reacts to Keanu Reeves' character calling him crazy by saying, "Poor people are crazy. I'm eccentric." David's millions buy him the freedom to be eccentric, because all he gets away with is crazy.