By: Benjamin Scuglia —
Actors Kirsten Dunst and Ryan Gosling headline the fact-based indie drama “All Good Things,” now in limited release from Magnolia Pictures And the real-life story that inspired it has taken a peculiarly creepy twist. The actual man portrayed—on film—as the likely murderer of his own wife has seen the movie. And he liked it.
Dunst plays a fictionalized version of Kathie Durst, whose mysterious 1982 disappearance remains unsolved. When she vanished, Kathie was married to Robert A. Durst, a real estate scion whose megarich family played an instrumental role in the redevelopment during the 1970s of Times Square. The sordid, bizarre backstory to Kathie’s disappearance, and other events surrounding it, form the basis of the film.
“If there was one person you’d expect to take issue with ‘All Good Things’… it would be Robert A. Durst, since it implicates him in three killings, two of which he is depicted as committing and a third as orchestrating. But you would be surprised,” notes a recent story in the “New York Times.”
Durst went on the record and said he liked the movie. Gosling was “(n)ot as good as the real thing,” but Dunst was a ringer. Now 67, Durst was questioned but never charged in his wife’s case. His embrace of the film is “probably based on its portrayal of him as a sad but very human character known as David Marks, whose childhood is scarred by his mother’s suicide and whose road to violence is paved by the pressures of life with an overbearing and distant father,” notes the “Times.”
The movie was directed by Andrew Jarecki, whose previous film was the hot-topic, Oscar-nominated documentary “Capturing the Friedmans.” Durst said “All Good Things” is “as reasonably accurate as anything out there [and] a whole lot more accurate than those endless TV documentaries. And this doesn’t pretend to be a documentary.” (The case also apparently inspired a 2004 episode of “Law & Order.”)
Another odd little twist (among many): Some twenty years after Kathie Durst vanished, her case was briefly reopened by Jeanine F. Pirro, then the district attorney to Westchester Country in New York. In the film, she is “Janet Rizzo” as portrayed by Diane Venora. Jarecki’s version of events implies she dropped the investigation with a little nudging from the politically connected Durst/Marks family. Today, Pirro is a talking head for cable news and the host of the syndicated “Judge Pirro” courtroom show.
CLICK HERE for the “Times” interview with Durst.