'Good Grief' review: Star Daniel Levy can't match talents of writer/director Daniel Levy

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Daniel Levy of “Schitt's Creek” fame makes his feature directorial debut with “Good Grief,” the story of a man discovering some uncomfortable truths after his husband dies in a car accident.

Levy also stars in the movie as Marc, while Luke Evans (Gaston in the live-action “Beauty and the Beast”) makes an all-too-brief appearance as his husband Oliver. Ruth Negga (“Loving”) and Himesh Patel (“Yesterday”) play Marc's best friends Sophie and Thomas.

After Oliver's death, the revelations commence: A Christmas card, hidden in a drawer, telling Marc that Oliver had planned to explore his feelings for another person. Then, there's the discovery of a pied-à-terre in Paris that Oliver kept from his London-dwelling husband.

So there's only one thing to do, one year later: make the journey to the City of Lights with the best pals and search for some answers.

MY SAY Levy also wrote the “Good Grief” screenplay and he fills it with scenes that feel authentic in their depiction of the grieving process, made all the more confusing and surreal because of Marc's posthumous discoveries.

As a filmmaker, he shows himself to be well-attuned to the complexity of the moment and to the need to unfurl these feelings slowly and in unexpected ways.

There are no grandiose revelations, just quiet moments at home or in restaurants or while walking the streets that articulate the clash between the desire to move forward, the inclination to mourn the person you thought you knew and the need to discover something closer to the truth.

It's a construct that requires an actor capable of conveying all this. And it's there that Levy lets himself down. Because we have spent so little time with Oliver — he shows up to a party early on, leads the guests in a singalong, and then hustles away to meet his fate — the movie needs a lead performance that communicates the scope of this loss without the benefit of the audience instinctively understanding it.

Levy is a fine actor in a certain context, but he struggles to portray the depth of Marc's unrest. He keeps the performance pitched at the same even, glum keel throughout the movie, punctuated only by bursts of sadness or sarcasm. The character stays at a considerable remove because of it, cut off from the audience just as significantly as he is from the people around him on screen.

Contrast that with the work Levy gets from Negga, a genuinely extraordinary actor, who invests so much natural warmth into Sophie that it's as if we've known this person for years.

A movie about Sophie might have been significantly more compelling, but that's not what we have in "Good Grief."  Instead, it's the story of a relatively uninteresting man going through something profound. It has moments of wisdom and beauty but too many others that hit the same notes again and again. 

BOTTOM LINE Levy the actor does not give Levy the director/screenwriter what he needed.