Hallie Meyers-Shyer Captured a Complicated Father-Daughter Relationship in Her New Film, ‘Goodrich’

When Hallie Meyers-Shyer started writing the follow-up to her debut film, Home Again, she knew her leading man had to be Michael Keaton. “I had worked on this script for five years, and I pictured him every step of the way,” Meyers-Shyer tells Vanity Fair over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “I tried to capture some of his mannerisms because I wanted to subliminally let him see himself in the part. I think that’s kind of cheating, but I wanted him to relate to it.”

The role is a departure for Keaton, who most recently reprised his iconic titular ghoul in this year’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Meyers-Shyer’s sentimental coming-of-a-certain-age film Goodrich casts the actor as a more human character, one with more heart and life. Keaton’s Andy Goodrich is an art gallery owner in Los Angeles whose world is turned upside down when his much-younger wife suddenly checks herself into a 90-day rehab program, forcing him to step in as the primary parent for their nine-year-old twins—while also confronting his fraught relationship with his pregnant adult daughter, Grace, played by a resilient Mila Kunis.

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As a child of divorce (her parents are the filmmakers Nancy Meyers and Charlie Shyer), the film is loosely based on Meyers-Shyer’s own experiences. Her father also remarried; like Goodrich, he has children who are significantly younger than the writer-director. According to Meyers-Shyer, the script poured out of her. “I drew a lot on my personal life,” she says. “I thought about a movie like Kramer vs. Kramer, and about how it’d be interesting if it was an older man, like my father, who has a second set of kids. What that would be like—to explore the idea of somebody parenting in the ’80s, and then again now, with different standards for fathers.”

When Goodrich is abruptly thrust back into fatherhood, attending parent-teacher conferences and minding food allergies, the landscape is completely foreign to him. But with the steadfast help of Grace, he rises to the occasion. Throughout the film, Grace must come to terms with watching Goodrich become the father she never had growing up. Meyers-Shyer knew that finding a performer who could hold their own opposite Keaton was going to be a challenge. “We wanted somebody who could match him onscreen with that kind of confidence and presence and be able to be funny and vulnerable,” she says. Enter Kunis. “Mila has that in spades.”

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At times, it’s heartwarming to see the unwavering bond between father and daughter, despite their contentious past. But as the film progresses, it’s heartbreaking to see Goodrich continue to disappoint Grace. It’s a complex relationship, the sort Meyers-Shyer says isn’t often represented onscreen. “We have a lot of complicated mother-daughter movies,” she says. “But we tend to think of the father-daughter relationship as very sweet, an apple-of-your-eye kind of thing—daddy’s girl. I thought it would be interesting to maybe show the underbelly.”

While the plot is fictionalized, Meyers-Shyer portrays a complex father-daughter relationship with the kind of specificity that could come only from someone who’s lived it—in ways both major and minor. One example of this comes when Goodrich asks Grace out for ice cream but has to leave abruptly to tend to one of the twins at a sleepover. “That scene is actually pretty emotional for me, even though it’s a really kind of small moment,” Meyers-Shyer says. When Goodrich forgets to pick up Grace for an important doctors appointment, Kunis delivers a scene-stealing monologue in which her pent-up emotions come flooding back: “I’m somebody that you call from the car,” she tells her father. “I don’t even remember what you look like in pajamas.”

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“Everyone was really blown away,” says Meyers-Shyer of the performance. “I knew that first take was going to be in the movie. She came out guns blazing.”

Just as Goodrich is finding his footing as a father to both generations of his children, his gallery is shuttering, and his marriage is ending. “When you think about the movie, nothing is going this guy’s way,” Meyers-Shyer says. “I wanted the larger theme of the movie to be that he has everything that he really needs in his life. He just doesn’t know where to look for it.” As the film unfolds, Goodrich gradually enters a new season of life, one where it’s finally possible to root for him. “That’s another really great thing about having an actor like Michael who the audience has a history with,” Meyers-Shyer says. “When you see him cry in the movie, it kills you because you’re kind of used to seeing Michael Keaton be super cool all the time.”

Though Meyers-Shyer started writing the film in 2018, it took her nearly six years to get Goodrich made. She understands that’s the nature of the business these days, especially when none of her characters are existing IP who wear costumes or fly. They shot Goodrich in just 25 days on location in Los Angeles. “One of the nice things about independent filmmaking is they’re so personal,” she says. “Sometimes when you make studio movies, they go through a lot of voices and channels and decisions, and they don’t often trust filmmakers like me who only have one film under my belt. Sometimes they do, and that’s really special. But one of the great things about making independent films is this is really the movie I set out to make.”

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Meyers-Shyer has plenty of experience seeing famous films get made, having grown up on the set of The Parent Trap, among others—but she says that she never took it too seriously. “Obviously I was so grateful to have that experience, but I was more interested in driving golf carts and having fun at craft services,” she says. “I was a kid. I wasn’t at the monitor.” Now, though, she turns to her parents for guidance, sending them her scripts to read. “I’m not going to lie. It’s really hard sometimes, because my parents’ notes are hard,” she says. “They’re hard on me in a way that they should be. They don’t sugarcoat things.”

Still, she’s grateful to have them as a resource. “The great thing about having parents who are writers is [that] when I showed them the movie, they just gave me notes and thoughts as filmmakers and not as people reflected in the movie in any way.”

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At the end of the film, after Grace gives birth, we see Goodrich holding his new grandchild. He looks up at Grace and says three simple words: “You’re my soulmate.” It’s a line that Meyers-Shyer and Keaton collaborated on, knowing that “I’m sorry” just wouldn’t cut it. “What he’s really saying to her is there’s a lot of women in the movie who come and go—wives come and go. She’s the one who’s there at the end,” she says.

It also calls to mind the ending of her father’s film Father of the Bride Part II, when Steve Martin is holding both his newborn child and grandchild at the hospital. I point out this invisible string to her own father’s work, and Meyers-Shyer smiles. “That’s nice. I like that,” she says as she conjures the image of the two fathers side by side in her mind. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

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