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THE REAL GIRLS Rating:  Director: David Gordon Green Producer: Jean Doumanian, Lisa Muskat Writer: David Gordon Green Director of Photography: Tim Orr Cast: Paul Schneider, Zooey Deschanel, Patricia Clarkson, Benjamin Mouton, Shea Wingham, Danny McBride, Maurice Compte Visit the IMDB page for full cast and crew |
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Review by: Warren
Curry
2/11/03
Considering just about no one saw his debut film, 2000's George Washington, it's peculiar that director David Gordon Green became one of the brightest names in the indie film world because of it. Of course, it never hurts to have Roger Ebert leading your cheering section, and while George Washington was a non-entity at the box office, critics fell all over themselves raving about the movie. Green's debut felt more like an above average student film to me than some extraordinary piece of cinema, and while his latest, All The Real Girls, marks a definite improvement, it's still a fairly uneven effort, which mixes some truly inspired scenes with others that are fairly sluggish.
As with Green's first film, All The Real Girls is set in the contemporary American South (North Carolina to be exact), and each movie depicts small town southern life to be a sort of hazy, lazy existence. In the first scene we meet the two central characters -- Paul (Paul Schneider), a 22-year-old definition of the slang term "townie," and the 18-year-old Noel (Zooey Deschanel), a young woman who has just returned home after spending the past several years at a boarding school. Apparently in the beginning stages of a relationship, their companionship is threatened by the disapproval of Tip (Shea Wingham), who happens to be both Paul's best friend and Noel's older brother. The reason for Tip's unhappiness with this development is simple: he and Paul have spent several years as a successful womanizing duo.
But if Tip's attitude were the only hurdle in Paul and Noel's way, their courtship would be a relatively easy one. The relationship starts to hit snags when the differences in the participants' backgrounds begin to take its toll. Although Noel has lived away from her hometown, and appears capable of once again leaving the confines of the isolated community, she is very green in the worlds of romance and, to be blunt, sex. While Paul may be plenty experienced in the latter, he is just as lacking in the former, and finds it difficult to properly communicate his feelings to Noel, especially when his friend Bust Ass (Danny McBride and, yes, really the character's name) starts to grow uncomfortably close to her.
Green dismisses familiar story conventions in favor of a deep character study and utilizes a lyrical approach in telling the tale. Shots of the setting's beautiful scenery adds to the movie's peaceful mood, and also provides an intimate atmosphere which somehow serves as an appropriate backdrop for the mounting emotional stakes. Late in the film, Paul's mother (the omnipresent Patricia Clarkson), who works as a clown entertaining hospitalized children, asks her brother/Paul's uncle (Benjamin Mouton), "Are we always going to stay this age?" It's such a simpleminded, yet relevant, question for the characters in All The Real Girls, because they seem like people who would survive the passage of time and still be carrying on in the same exact manner 100 years later. In Green's world, life lessons are learned incrementally and, even then, the focus is more about asking questions than receiving answers.
Zooey Deschanel (Almost Famous, The Good Girl), reminding me a little bit of Robin Tunney here, delivers a performance I didn't think she was capable of at this point in her career. Previously, I've only seen her in very one note supporting roles, and this time out she's asked to hit quite a range of emotions. One particularly charged scene between she and Paul is pulled off amazingly well and will strike a chord with anyone who's lived through the growing pains of a relationship. It doesn't seem if Paul Schneider has to extend himself too much in his role, and he keeps his performance tastefully understated.
A few too many times, All The Real Girls feels like it doesn't completely know where it's going. Clarkson's character isn't fully fleshed out, and a few gimmicky scenes (i.e. Paul's dance in the deserted bowling alley) come off a little contrived. The leisurely pace and lack of any big story twists (except possibly one) most likely will keep audiences from turning up en masse to this movie.
David Gordon Green will probably next work on a bigger stage and he deserves the chance. Perhaps the director will be able to make the kind of serious films for young adults that the studio machine is apparently incapable of producing anymore. All The Real Girls displays an artist progressing at an encouraging speed.
(A Sony Pictures Classics release. Opens in New York and Los Angeles on February 14, 2003. Expands to more cities at later dates.)
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