Review

Review Date: 18-August-02
Spoiler Rating: High
Juju Judgment: Just OK

The Good Girl (2002)

In "The Good Girl," Jennifer Aniston plays Justine, a 30-year-old Texas woman who is bored with her dopey, stoner husband (John C. Reilly) and her dead-end job at a discount emporium. Grasping at the one potentially interesting thing that comes her way, she begins an affair with a 22-year-old misfit coworker (Jake Gyllenhaal), who was christened Tom but prefers to be called "Holden," after J. D. Salinger's quintessential disillusioned young man. For a little while, Justine feels she has something to look forward to when she gets up in the morning, but before long her adultery puts her in the hot seat and she's faced with several choices, none of them pleasant --- at best, they will send her back to the emptiness of her former life; at worst, they will ruin her home, threaten the future of her newly conceived child, and put her on the wrong side of the law. In the end, she finds a way to keep on going and retain some trace of hope, but to say she discovers how to break free and find happiness would be going a bit too far.

In other words, "The Good Girl," directed by Miguel Arteta, is rather bleak. During one of Justine's voice-overs at the beginning, she wonders if other people are too dense to feel the pointlessness of their lives, or if they are all silently screaming in frustration as she is. As it turns out, just about everyone she knows is doing the latter, struggling to find a way to get through their days without going mad, and using all of the standard means available to the average American: drugs, television, religion, cynicism, and delusion. Thus, we have Justine's husband Phil, who appears at first to be just a doped-up loser, but eventually reveals that his weed helps him "escape" the harshness of reality; we have Phil's best friend Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson), who is both sustained and subjugated by his obsessive fascination with Phil and Justine's marriage; we have Justine's coworker Corny (screenwriter Mike White), whose adherence to the teachings of Jesus can't quite overcome his natural inclination toward meanness; we have another coworker, Cheryl, who vents her spleen in little puffs of antisocial behavior; and we have Holden, who drinks, writes, gets violent and falls madly in love, and, still unable to find a foothold, ends up slipping away entirely.

Now and again I enjoy contemplating the bleakness of the average human existence, but "The Good Girl" didn't fully work for me: something about it didn't ring true, either to my sense of what life is really like, or to my sense of what it should be like. While I understand that desperation makes people self-absorbed, I was disturbed by the fact that none of the characters (except the simple Phil) ever thinks about anyone other than him or herself. (Such extreme myopia alone could account for the unhappiness of the entire cast!) This negative characterization was particularly unsettling when applied to the lead. While I suppose viewers are meant to feel some sympathy for Justine, the level of degradation and underhandedness to which she sinks fairly early on prevented me from caring whether or not she found a solution to her problems. In addition, her character displays a few inconsistencies that removed her even further from my interest. For example, whereas she appears to be only moderately educated (she has never heard of "The Catcher in the Rye"), some of the voice-overs which express her thoughts are downright poetic and delivered with an unusually high degree of eloquence and grammatical exactness. I was left wondering, exactly what sort of person is this? What does she really want? What dreams or talents of hers are being wasted? I can relate to and pity her feeling of impotence, but she lies, cheats on her husband, flirts with the thought of murder, prostitutes herself to protect her secret, seriously considers larceny, and consents to bringing another life into this world which she holds in so much scorn (and a fine mother she'll be, no doubt) --- is the degree of her desperation enough for me to accept these things? And is the assumption of the film that all who feel trapped and stifled by their dull lives would do the same?

The fault for Justine's questionable portrayal does not lie with Jennifer Aniston, who appears to be an entirely capable actress and whose earnest face imparts to Justine what little attraction the character has. Gyllenhaal is good at playing dark and unhinged, and allows Holden just a hint of cuteness to explain why someone would see him as an opportunity. John C. Reilly, bless him, is wonderful as always as the progressively endearing Phil. But I think White, in his role as writer, missed the mark. I assume he intended to show how debilitating run-of-the-mill lives can be, and how thin the line is that separates the apparently complacent citizens among us from the desperate and deranged. But instead of emphasizing the sad effects of middle-American ennui, he has highlighted the amorality and self-obsession of people who, for whatever reason, are ready to commit acts of cruelty, deception, and fraud upon each other if only to make themselves feel a little better --- and that's just not entertainment.

Copyright © 2002 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.