The Good Girl (2002)
Grade: C+
Cast: Jennifer Aniston, Jake Gyllenhaal, John C. Reilly, Tim Blake Nelson, Mike White, Zooey Deschanel
Director: Miguel Arteta
Rated R for sexuality, drug content, language.


The following review contains some spoilers. Most of them have been revealed in other critics' reviews, but I thought I should give you a fair warning if you want to go into this film without prior plot knowledge.
Everybody loves “The Good Girl”. But of course they do. It’s edgy, it’s indie, and it’s got a reputation-tossing performance from a Good Girl. What could be better?

The Good Girl in question is Jennifer Aniston, of TV’s “Friends”. Her character on “Friends”, Rachel, is about as perfect as anyone could possibly wish to be. One wonders why she interrupts regular perfect life to hump dino geek Ross (David Schwimmer) from time to time, but mostly she’s pretty perfect. In real life, Aniston has a great wardrobe, and is married to Brad Pitt, a man whom just about every female I know would like to be married to. And since her life sucks in “The Good Girl”, it must be a great movie, because Aniston isn’t playing herself. I’m telling you, it’s great. Right? Right??

Wrong. “The Good Girl”, from the director (Miguel Arteta) and writer (Mike White) of “Chuck & Buck”, which made my top 10 of 2000, is a major step down from their original collaboration. “Chuck & Buck” took a disturbing character and focused on what it is like for people responding him, creating an uneasy comedy—like “One Hour Photo”, only darkly funny. “The Good Girl” could also be compared to “One Hour Photo” for several reasons—the great, unconventional lead performance; the depressing atmosphere; the low budget; the disturbing occurrences in a supermarket—but it’s far inferior.

What bothers me most about “The Good Girl”, I think, is its self-importance. The theater practically rumbles as it subliminally screams at the audience, “Jennifer Aniston is in this movie, and it is independent! This is an INDEPENDENT movie! Look, we have crappy cinematography and a low budget.” Folks, put away the rulers, because “The Good Girl”’s self-importance isn’t measured in inches—it’s measured in miles.

The story? Some spoilers follow. Justine (Aniston) is trapped in a life of eternally one-dimensional repetition. The same routine every day: go to work at the Retail Rodeo—a store that wishes to attract the high-class crowds that regularly frequent WalMart—and then go home to her lazy loser painter husband (John C. Reilly, “Magnolia”) and his best friend (Tim Blake Nelson, co-star of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and director of “O”) sitting in front of the TV. She hates her job, and she doesn’t much care for her husband either, who may or may not be infertile, and if he is, it may or may not be because he occasionally smokes pot to pass the time (for example, he is high when the following conversation occurs: “That can lower your sperm count.” “Lower it to where?”).

One of the film’s best assets is the fact that it does a good job of giving us a depressingly monotonous atmosphere, a setting projecting the kind of boring hell in which one questions why one exists at all, if the world one exists in must suck so much. For a normal person, this feeling only comes up during depressing times. For Justine, it’s a permanent state of mind. This does not save the film, though, unless you enjoy coming from a movie feeling suicidal.

For the reason that life, for Justine, blows, we can almost but not quite see why she is interested in the creepy and self-satisfied Holden, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. In “Donnie Darko”, Gyllenhaal played a schizophrenic in contact with an apocalypse-predicting bunny demon, and he did a much better job there. With Donnie, Gyllenhaal projected a playful sense of wonder, dark humor, and matter-of-factness to his absurdity. With Holden, he keeps the matter-of-factness but loses the wonder and dark humor, creating an empty void where we think a character is supposed to be. His self-satisfaction is about as repelling as the rest of the movie’s. We can’t understand why anyone would want to be around the guy, let alone have an affair with him and enjoy it.

That’s about as much plot as there is; the film does not rely on story, but the twists of the story, which may initially startle you but are not ultimately very interesting (or plausible, for that matter—why was Tim Blake Nelson at the hotel??). That’s the problem with the film—it’s not interesting. All the pieces for a good film are in place, but cannot be connected because we are bored out of our minds. The acting is uniformly excellent, although I didn’t care for Gyllenhaal. Aniston is very good, although perhaps she would have been better if she were given more to do than stare into space and scream at her husband. Speaking of which, John C. Reilly isn’t bad, but we don’t really know anything about the character, and he appears to know very little more than us. I liked Tim Blake Nelson and Mike White a lot. Perhaps “uniformly excellent” was not the phrase I was looking for.

Maybe if “The Good Girl” had been written more skillfully, it would have been a more interesting. And maybe it was just the mood I was in—you know, after so many suburban hell/midlife crisis flicks, the hook gets pretty old. But, then, why did a similar atmosphere work for “One Hour Photo” less than a month ago?

I will end with some advice for the cast and crew of “The Good Girl”.
Mike White: rewrite your next script. Or do a sequel to “Chuck & Buck”.
Miguel Arteta: Just because your film is low-budget and independent with a big name star, it isn’t necessarily good. Don’t be so confident.
Jennifer Aniston: Make sure you choose a better film to display your until-now-invisible talents in.
Tim Blake Nelson: Never appear in a nude scene again.


-Alex, September 2002