Dan Levy’s Self-Absorbed Netflix Death Drama

A sensitive but almost fatally self-absorbed death drama that has much to say and little to feel, Dan Levy’s “Good Grief” is determined to convince you that life is better confronted than run from; in the plainspoken words of a character who brings the message home in the movie’s final minutes, “to avoid sadness is also to avoid love.” The moral is true, but the delivery feels unconvincing at the end of this movie, a story of private loss and shared friendship that reflects its protagonist’s struggle to integrate the two. 

But if Levy’s Netflix film proves to be a strangely precocious debut for a 40-year-old success who already has a hit TV show to his name (Levy co-created “Schitt’s Creek” and steered the sitcom throughout its run), its broad and unrelentingly fabulous characters still manage — if only by accident — to convey something about grief that I had never really considered before: In a certain respect, it might be a lot harder for rich people.

Rich people like Marc Dreyfus (Levy), a newly widowed American expat who has nothing to do but swan around the half-empty — but fully exquisite — London flat that his Adonis-like husband (Luke Evans) left to him after being killed in a car crash on Christmas Eve. It can’t be easy to lose someone that hot at such a young age, and it’s perfectly understandable that Marc responds to the tragedy by trying to avoid everything that reminds him of his late husband (work being…