Jessica Chastain was all over the Oscar season last year, with people fighting to predict which of her several acclaimed performances — The Help, Take Shelter, The Tree of Life — would land her an inevitable Best Supporting Actress nomination. And she’s about to be in a somewhat similar position this year, albeit in a more high-profile manner. This time around, we virtually know she’ll be a Best Actress nominee for Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty — the question is whether or not she’ll win.
So it’s with a good deal of momentum that The Wrap announces that Chastain has been offered a lead role in an upcoming adaptation of Marcus Sakey‘s novel Good People. The part would pair-up Chastain with James Franco, and it’s hard not to get immediately excited about the kinds of fireworks these two live-wire talents could set off together. The story, which has been adapted from Sakey‘s novel by Kelly Masterson (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead), “follows a couple in their 30s in severe debt who finds the tenant in their downstairs apartment has died and left a stack of cash.” The obligatory moral-crisis element to the plot synopsis reads as follows: “If they take the money, all of their problems will be solved. But that’s when bad things start happening to good people.”
If that doesn’t sound like a particularly eye-popping premise, well, there’s at least quite a bit of promise to be found in the pedigree of the collaborators. I know next to nothing about the project’s director, Henrik Genz, though IMDb informs me that a short film of his, Theis and Nico, was nominated for a Best Short Film, Live Action Oscar back in 2000. And even if that may only leave us with a vague notion of Genz‘s ability, much more can be said for the other potential contributors. The impressiveness of the résumés behind Chastain and Franco, for instance, are obvious, and hardly need to be spelled out in full here. Masterson, too, has proven himself a unique voice, having scripted Sidney Lumet‘s piercing family crime thriller as well as Snowpiercer, the forthcoming English-language debut of revered South Korean director Joon-ho Bong (The Host, Mother).
It appears that Chastain‘s confirmed involvement, then, would seal the deal on something that could turn out to be rather good. Hopefully we’ll catch word of it soon enough.
What do you think about this project’s early potential?