Archive for August, 2002

Dis­ap­point­ment. That’s the first word that comes to mind when describ­ing Jen­nifer Aniston’s new film, The Good Girl but it’s not the film that’s dis­ap­point­ing, in fact, quite the oppo­site. It’s only the character’s lives. Jus­tine Last (Anis­ton) doesn’t seem to have a lot going for her, start­ing with her hus­band Phil (John C. Reilly) who’s a stoner loser, and a dead­end job work­ing at the makeup counter at the Retail Rodeo. What’s a bored girl in a bor­ing town to do? If you’re Jus­tine, the answer is an unequiv­o­cal “not much.”

She has dreams of leav­ing her small Texas town and doing some­thing else, any­thing else, it’s just that she doesn’t know what that some­thing is or any­thing else it might entail. Like many peo­ple stuck in fail­ing mar­riages, she thinks a baby will help, but she can’t get preg­nant. A pos­si­ble one way ticket out comes in the form of a new clerk at the Retail Rodeo, Holden Worther (Jake Gyl­len­haal), a dark and mys­te­ri­ous wannabe writer, for­mer alco­holic and col­lege dropout who lives with his par­ents. He’s so dif­fer­ent that Jus­tine finds him fas­ci­nat­ing.  To have some change and excite­ment in her life she begins an affair with Holden that nat­u­rally expands into a wider net, envelop­ing peo­ple and cre­at­ing lies, thiev­ery and death where there would not have been before. She lays awake at night, star­ing at the back­yard and thinks about leav­ing him since she believes his being high is the rea­son they can’t have chil­dren. What she really is sad about is her life and wants to change it but doesn’t know how.

The movie is very funny, but most often laugh­ter in film doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily come from humor­ous sit­u­a­tions but rather pathos, which is show­cased here well. You’re not laugh­ing at Jus­tine because what she’s doing is funny, but rather that’s all one can do when faced with a pathetic sit­u­a­tion like this. Whether it’s Phil’s drug-addled ram­blings or Jus­tine drop­ping off a seri­ously ill coworker who needs to get to the emer­gency room of the hos­pi­tal and then dri­ving away, you laugh, but what keeps com­ing back is that these peo­ple are just sad lit­tle peo­ple drift­ing through life. The moral of the this story seems to be that peo­ple should be open with each other about their wants and dreams, which Jus­tine doesn’t do a good job of com­mu­ni­cat­ing. But an alter­nate moral be that someone’s life could have been saved if Phil just didn’t do drugs all the time?

Jen­nifer Anis­ton, who has been fight­ing her Friends /Rachel Greene image ever since she started doing films seems to be tak­ing the first steps in cre­at­ing a dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter here. Maybe she’s tak­ing career advice  from hubby Brad Pitt (“Don’t do the main­stream film. Go indie, baby, like me in Snatch . The crit­ics will love you.”). The Good Girl is worth one hun­dred Rock Stars or The Object of My Affec­tion for act­ing cred­i­bil­ity and she does well as the lost girl who doesn’t know which way to go. Only when the fit hits the shan does she try to do the right thing, and doing the right thing doesn’t always end all sweet and sugary.