Spotlight
Spotlight Date: 19-October-03
Spoiler Rating: Medium
All the Real Girls (2003)
Zooey Deschanel gained a lot of admirers when "All the Real Girls" came out earlier this year, so I thought I had better check out her performance before awards season began and claims of "she was robbed!" began to appear on the Internet. Although the acting is the high point of this movie, I doubt it will prove to be Deschanel's big break, because (1) she isn't the real star, and (2) it's not that good. "All the Real Girls" feels like an excellent short story turned into a passable feature-length film. The bare facts of the tale are interesting enough — how the discovery of true love sets a small town Lothario on the road to maturity — but their impact is stretched thin by the self-conscious employment of homespun slices of life that fail to enhance the plot, and instead distract from it. Writer/director David Gordon Green has thought up a good illustration of the pain inherent in truly perceiving yourself and others, but his story loses some of its truth in the telling.
The movie opens just as a young woman (Deschanel) boldly entices her new beau (Paul Schneider) into their first kiss. (Others have identified them as Paul and Noel, but I didn't ever catch their names in the film.) We soon find out that she has just returned to their backwater Southern town after years away at boarding school, during which time he has been working as a mechanic, drinking a lot of beer, and sleeping his way through the local women with nary a plan or a care for the future. Both of the lovers recognize that their relationship is something special, but the problem is that it's special to each of them for a different reason. Paul views their mutual respect and affection as a doorway to a new, better version of himself, whereas Noel is relieved to find someone she trusts so that she can learn about sex, of which she has no experience. (Another problem is that her older brother, who is Paul's best friend, disapproves of the affair, but this is one of the film's unnecessary sidebars.) So, after Paul and Noel's first flush of joyous discovery, their bubble bursts in a dramatic but believable way, leaving them with more questions than answers and a painful sort of wisdom that neither was hoping to find.
"All the Real Girls" unfolds in a series of tableaux that depict the small scope of Paul's world and his nascent self-awareness. We watch as he kicks around with his slacker friends, chats with his grieving uncle, plays with Noel's retarded brother, and engages in strained discussions with his mother (Patricia Clarkson), a bitterish professional clown with whom he has a somewhat codependent relationship. His narrow environment, as contrasted with the universal import of his crisis, is emphasized by the quaint setting; scene follows leisurely scene of mill race and billowing tree, of old church and rusting flatbed, which appear between exaggerated fades of black reminiscent of a slide show in your grandpa's parlor. The idiosyncratic lesser characters exposed in the sepia tones of Mill Town, USA, threaten to drown the film in precious art house conceit; but, luckily, it is consistently brought back into focus by Schneider's honest portrayal of desperation and the quiet strength of Deschanel in a key but supporting role. Schneider brings out many facets of Paul's personality, including swagger, charm, anger, bewilderment, determination, a weird sense of honor, and intelligence (a refreshing characteristic for a hick in the movies). The arc of the story is his, and he travels it with grace. Although they have to wade through some decidedly contrived dialogue (meant, I assume, to simulate "real life"), Paul and Noel always appear to be reaching out for each other and swept up in the torrent of their infatuation. At its core, the movie illustrates the enormous power of love both to build up and to break down, and when Paul and Noel share the screen, this force banishes all the Southern fried distraction around them from stagy triviality to utter irrelevance.
This is the second film I have seen this year (after "Raising Victor Vargas") that deals with a callow playboy from a distinctive culture who begins to grow up after he falls for a more emotionally mature virgin. This storyline has a greater degree of feeling and truth than the average Hollywood romance, and the stars of "All the Real Girls" do a good job describing the pleasure, pain, and confusion of their situation. But as "Vargas" showed to greater effect, simplicity does not require languor, nor ambiance a studied unconformity. The main characters of "All the Real Girls" go to your heart, but the rest of the film falls by the wayside.
Copyright © 2003 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.
