MOVIE REVIEW
The Good Girl

by Rudy Tomlinsky

This article contains pertinent details of the plot, so beware:

This was the first time I've paid to see a movie in several weeks, and I certainly was not disappointed with The Good Girl. The question of whether or not Jennifer Aniston (playing housewife Justine Last) can carry a movie may still be up for discussion, but this much is certain: she is a good girl in this film.

Girl takes place in any mid-sized town in the Lone Star Republic, better known as Texas. It follows the disheartening travails of a thirty year old married woman who is completely bored with her life and marriage to Phil Last, played by veteran actor, John C. Reilly.

Justine works at a local department store called Rodeo Retail and is completely miserable with her simple job as the resident beauty department supervisor. The women who come into the store have absolutely no idea what fashion or elegance is, which makes the scenes genuinely funny because these women are so easily influenced by their trusted salespeople.

Justine meets Holden, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, a melodramatic and reclusive young adult who struggles to find rhyme or reason in his convoluted world of insecurity and misunderstood identity. Holden is an introvert who devotes his time to writing and hating the world from within, and fancies himself after the protagonist in The Catcher and the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

Justine immediately relates to young Holden, whose eyes are filled with angst and discontent. They proceed to have a wild tryst including impromptu sexual romps in the storage room of Rodeo Retail. The movie chronicles the liberation of Justine as she rediscovers what living really means to her. Along her journey she seems to have some Anti-Midas Touch which results in everyone she comes across becoming the object of some horrid mishap. Justine becomes entangled in a web of lies as she scrambles to cover up one with another, while Phil's best friend, Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson) discovers the truth about Justine and Holden.

The acting is solid all the way around, especially in the supporting cast, led by Nelson and Reilly. Zooey Deschanel plays Cheryl, an acerbic teen who respects nobody, is contemptuous of all, and ends up a real scene stealer, making very good use of her screen time in this very smart and effectively sadistic film. Aniston is believable as an aloof and frustrated wife of a slacker pothead painter husband. The film never seems too slow, and the plot never becomes formulaic or predictable, much too common unfortunately these days in film.

One of the best parts of Good Girl is the non-Hollywood ending. Director Miguel Arteta does not try to wrap this film up with a little bow, like pussy Spielberg did in Minority Report, or many others that follow the mantra of the basic cinematic ending with some contrived bullshit that pleases everyone.

Walk, don't run, to the local cineplex.

From Wilshire Gazette (November 2002)

* * * * *

Directed by Miguel Arteta
Written by Mike White
Starring: Jennifer Aniston, Jake Gyllenhaal,
John C. Reilly, & Tim Blake Nelson

Rated R for sexuality, some language,
and drug content

Running Time: 93 minutes

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