The Good Girl
Got this film from Netflix yesterday, and since I'm working on a screenplay about infidelity, let's call this the first in many films about infidelity and adultery I'll be watching in the next 12 months as this as yet-unnamed film of mine takes shape.
(A note on my film commentary: I'm not a reviewer or a critic, so the nature of my comments will change as my particular interests in a movie changes. Who knows what I'll say.)
The plot of The Good Girl in brief: Justine (played by Jennifer Anniston) is a bored retail clerk working in a backwater Texas town who hates her life, her job, and her pothead husband (John C. Reilly), who she claims is a pig. Within the first two minutes of the film's opening, Justine lays eyes on a new employee of the Retail Rodeo, a idealistic, "put-upon" young man named Tom who calls himself Holden. (He's a Catcher in the Rye fan.)
To make a small story short, Justine has an affair with Tom, is terribly conflicted about it, and eventually does the right thing, making a choice that leads to the salvation of her marriage, if not her life.
The filmmakers get the rhythms of depressed Texas life just right...I know a bunch of people just like Justine and her husband Phil. Aniston's performance is pretty impressive (though her skin is far too smooth to be the trailer trash she's made out to be--Texas people like this look flat run-over). But the film's gathering strength is constantly undercut by weird breaches of reality: the ugly retail store they work in, which is a lousy rendition of stores that actually exist--customers nevercome to this place, except tottering old women willing to subject themselves to incredibly dumb make-overs. And why Justine settles on lover Tom is beyond me...he's a doe-eyed loser from the get-go, (his tropes about romance and "not being got" are funny at first, but turn to tripe in a hurry)...but then, I suppose these things happen.
At the pivotal point in the film, Justine sits at a red light at the proverbial crossroads. And here she makes the choice we want her to make, but for no good reason that we can see. Justine is confused morally from beginning to end, (she's still lying at the end of the thing, and the odd part is, we don't really care) driven solely by her selfish need to break out of her funk, and in the end, its hard to get a sense of what's been gained on the journey. Not that I need a lesson. But perhaps Justine does--otherwise she's likely to do the whole thing again, just with a man who's older and not as dumb as the guy she picked this time.
Aniston's performance is nuanced and empathetic. If it wasn't, we'd really hate this woman for what she does to her admittedly under-achiever husband. (But hey, she should love him--what's not to love? He fixes the TV, doesn't he? Isn't that what dumb Texas hick husbands do to show love?)
This movie is like an annoyingly ambiguous person you really like...you know there's truth in there somewhere, but do we have to work this hard to get it? Of course, the most annoying thing is that I liked it...I liked it a lot.
Probably 'cause I'm from Texas, and I know these people.
8:07:57 AM 
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