Dear Movies,

I just had the misfortune of watching The Good Girl last night, and you need to hear the things I am about to tell you, because: no. And: boo. And: zzz. I hope you packed a lunch. And a notebook.

Let’s start with the relentless quirk. “Quirky” is not synonymous with “interesting.” Tricking up your characters with a bunch of pointed eccentricities instead of imbuing them with actual, recognizable traits suggests that you don’t know how to imbue them with such traits, or that you think your story is thin but you’d rather baroque up the setting to try to disguise that fact instead of going back and identifying the central conflict. Don’t do that.

While I’ve got you here on the subject: “quirky” is also not synonymous with “every small town in America”; “every small town in America” is not itself synonymous with “a sunny, bland, provincial exterior masking a cold, grimily hypocritical heart”; substituting “south of the Mason-Dixon line” for “in America” does not make the depiction any less tired and twee. Nobody in Santa Claus, Georgia or Gardner, Wyoming has an inner life, or ambitions, or even basic cable? and any inner lives they do have burble up, like the belches that proceed vomiting, from some noxious honeysuckle fumarole of curdled Confederate courtesy? About a tenth as interesting on screen as I just made it sound, and probably at least a small part of the reason New York and L.A. feel distrusted by the rest of the country. I won’t sit here and tell you every small town is twinkling lights and cherry pie, but come up with something else to say about it, because we’ve already got a Faulkner.

We’ve already got a Holden Caulfield, too, and you’ve just got to accept that and move on. Don’t name your characters after him, don’t have your characters name themselves after him, don’t have your characters talk about him or even know who he is, until 2056. It is hacky. It is adolescent. It is the Godwin’s Law of character development. Only putting Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on the soundtrack shows me as much of your ass as a Catcher in the Rye reference, and the view is not impressive. Understand: this is not a trope you can subvert. It’s like naming a character “Moses” and then having him drown at the end of the second act; it’s not even ironic, because it’s got no point except itself.

Ditto using self-conscious character names to do your characterization work for you. “Justine Last”? “Holden Worther”? “Corny”? “Bubba”? Do you think I care about these human Colorforms now that you’ve hit manual override on the giving-them-more-than-one-dimension machine? Because I don’t. I know you want me to, because you’ve gone to some lengths to draw clear parallels between their baggy, shapeless, ad-hoc clothing and hairstyles and their dead-end ex-urban ennui — and in case that anvil didn’t squash me flatter than an ant at an NBA picnic, you made sure to include the connection between retail drudgery and suffocating in a loveless marriage. And I still don’t care. Why is that, do you suppose?

Perhaps it’s because I’ve actually visited Santa Claus, Georgia and I know for a fact they have access to hairbrushes, Wellbutrin, and the Gap, but more likely it’s because I don’t understand Justine at all — her motivations, what brought her to this point, why she’s making these choices. The movie begins in medias res, except that I can’t figure out what “res,” exactly, or why she wants a baby with a man she clearly holds in contempt at best, or why they got married in the first place. If I understood these things, perhaps I would take an interest in her journey, but the fact is, you’ve told me she’s led a blearily beige mom-jeans life for close to a decade and then, seemingly out of nowhere, becomes a person who tries to kill her fetal boyfriend with roadside blackberries. Do you…see what I mean? When it’s written out like that? That all the ham-fisted leitmotifs about wind and TVs on the fritz and how she “doesn’t think she can do makeovers” won’t make the character sympathetic, because you didn’t make her sympathetic, because you didn’t make her, period?

A stronger actor might have sold this sad sack; maybe this is your point, that the struggle to find some small happiness takes place whether anyone else is watching or not. But Jennifer Aniston is not the actor for the role; casting her is yet another instance of gimmickry trying for “clever” and failing. Oh, look, it’s the girl with the hair from Friends, submitting to degrading sex with Tim Blake Nelson (and, afterwards, his penis, which I didn’t need to see) while a German shepherd barks hysterically in the corner and her engagement setting winks mirthlessly at the camera! I don’t think I get it! …Oh, wait. I do. …Oh, wait. I don’t. There isn’t anything to get. It’s a sight gag that doesn’t work, in a movie that isn’t about that kind of thing.

I don’t have anything against Jennifer Aniston. She seems like a nice person, I think I’d enjoy hanging out with her, and I feel horrible for her, having to watch the whole Brangelina fooferaw with everyone else watching her. She’s a hard worker, and you should have gotten her a better accent coach and written her a role that didn’t make her do all the heavy lifting, because she’s not up to it, because, really, nobody is “up to” an entirely inorganic voice-over salted with cheesy similes. The character is almost completely unrealized, and Aniston doesn’t have the skills to give Justine the necessary depth; doing a lot of beleaguered sitcommy staring doesn’t really qualify as a “departure,” so much. The other issue is that, in my opinion, Jennifer Aniston is not a great beauty, or terribly charismatic. She is a triumph of five-star Hollywood grooming, but without that, she’s just another girl on the 6 train. Which is fine, but Bubba obsesses over Justine to the point where he blackmails her into sleeping with him, thereby cuckolding his best friend. Tom/Holden stalks her, then kills himself because Justine betrays him. Her husband knows she’s cheated on him and suspects that the baby she’s carrying isn’t his, but he takes her back anyway, and the last scene is of their happy (or at least “not actively depressed and acting out”) family. Not that that doesn’t happen, or hasn’t happened, but Aniston’s version of Justine is manifestly flat and unmagnetic; it’s not believable. The casting is problematic, but the writing is really at fault.

How did that happen? Well, because Mike White is coasting. I loved Chuck & Buck, and speaking of human sight gags…Mike White is one, God love him, and he’s a big enough man to hang that shingle out. But Orange County is pretty terrible, and I liked School of Rock, but it felt Colorforms-y in parts to me too. A movie like that isn’t built for fine-toothed character study, but on the other hand, it doesn’t have to play like a correctly filled-in Mad Lib, either, and in a lot of spots, that’s how it played. Sarah Silverman’s character is straight out of The Big Book of First-Act Obstacles.

It’s an indie-film problem, I think, because indie films give you a lot of freedom creatively that studio films don’t. We can all think of exceptions to that rule, of course, but MGM just isn’t going to put through a picture like Chuck & Buck; you have to do it on a smaller scale, but that smaller scale means smaller, less homogenized expectations, and it lets you get weird and do things differently if you need to, which is why independent film is essential in terms of keeping film storytellers honest. In theory, anyway. In practice, it’s a lot like writing for the internet, in that you can get into a lot of bad habits because there isn’t always the same discipline — whenever I get a print assignment, and it’s “we want a hundred words on XYZ,” I can start wailing all, “But I’ve got a thousand words, every one of them a diamond millions of years in the making,” or I can fit my bling into the space allotted because if I can’t, they’ll find someone who can.

It’s not an exact analogy, but my point is that it feels to me like Mike White got a lot of positive attention for Chuck & Buck, which he deserved, and spent time on two culty shows, Freaks & Geeks and the soap parody Pasadena, that strengthened his cred, and then he didn’t really have to deal with the weaknesses and tics that all writers have, either because nobody called him on them, or because he felt he’d gotten hired to do The Mike White Thing, and he did it: eccentric characters, often childlike in their compulsions; doodle-dee-doo soundtrack; minor-chord denouement with an apparently happy resolution that leaves questions unanswered. I don’t think he’s a bad writer generally speaking, and I’ve seen worse material from good writers, and who knows what happened between White’s original story and what got shot. But this movie is not good writing. It’s lazy and tricksy and incomplete, and it uses Gwen’s death and Tom/Holden’s parents and a lot of other cardboard-cutout whimsy as crutches, and if there’s a message, it’s obscured by all the icing doodles on a cake that doesn’t have eggs in it.

Writing a strong story and rounded characters is fucking hard, but when a movie is sucky or boring, the writing is the problem ninety-nine times out of a hundred. (The hundredth time, it’s Claire Forlani.) (Rimshot!) And it’s not easy to fix, but it’s apparently not a priority to fix, either — everyone would rather blow some shit up, or cast a big name, or monkey around with distracting edits, or ladle on a thick gravy of fart jokes and golden oldies and twitchy behaviors, than hammer out the writing issues before shooting starts. And you can’t fix everything, I know that; I know that, sometimes, you don’t really know how it’s going to look until you start, but even then, you can get the writer down to the set and fine-tune on the fly — and besides, how hard is it to suss out that an emotionally impacted character like Justine is not really the type to credibly muse in voice-over about roads disappearing into the horizon? Why does every movie not have a story editor whose sole duty is to utter the phrase “people don’t talk like that” until all the unrealistic dialogue is pressed out?

Because it’s doable. Brokeback Mountain did it. That movie put “people don’t talk like that” dialogue, dialogue that had to cover a continent’s worth of emotional terrain, in the mouths of people who don’t talk much at all, never mind “like that,” and I just imagine Larry McMurtry at his typewriter all, “I’ve got one character who can deliver exposition? Well, fuck me,” but he worked it out somehow. I can remember maybe one scene where Gyllenhaal came off a little oral-report-y, but he got it done — he could do the work he had to do, because the writing didn’t make him do all of it.

A movie is a story. Learn to tell a story, and if it’s not a good story, pay a good storyteller to rewrite it until it is good, and if it’s not working, don’t make a movie out of it, and if you make a movie out of it anyway, put a note on Netflix telling me not to rent it because I’ll hate it and regret wasting 94 minutes on it, and in order for it not to seem like a waste, I’ll have to write it up for Tomato goddamn Nation and drag the readers by the hair through another process discussion instead of telling a funny story about how the cat tried to nap in the slow cooker someone brought to my white elephant party. Which he did. Quirky as hell, that cat.

Smarten up,
Sarah

January 23, 2006

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