All Good Things (2010)

Based on the curious real-life case of Robert Durst, a man who appears to have gotten away with murder not once, but three times. Ryan Gosling plays Durst (here named David Marks, I suppose to avoid a lawsuit) the prodigal son of a billionaire New York real estate investor, who marries Katherine (Kirstin Dunst), a girl from a lower-middle class Long island family. David Marks' psychosis starts to emerge when his monstrous father (the great Frank Langella) forces him into the family business, and after a few years of an increasingly miserable marriage, Katherine mysteriously disappears and was never seen again (this was 1982). David disappears shortly thereafter and years later a family friend writes a novel loosely based on the case who's then found murdered in her home. Marks doesn't emerge again until 2000, when he's found living in Galveston as a woman, and is accused of murdering his elderly next door neighbor.

This is a bit tawdry, maybe because the real-life case is so bizarre. Director Andrew Jarecki seems to be aiming for a thundery, Douglas Sirk-type family melodrama, complete with murder and cross-dressing, but comes up empty-handed. The film seems shrill. Unfortunate, because Dunst hasn't been this good since Bogdanovich's Cat's Meow, and Ryan Gosling tries his hardest to fill in the gaps of a character that, at least in the script, is ghostly and incomplete. Perhaps if this didn't take itself too seriously (I suspect the filmmakers thought they were creating art) this might have been more enjoyable.