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Review by Harvey Karten
3 stars out of 4
We hear stories all the time about young people who are
depressed, who try suicide, whose raging hormones give them
no peace and who can't wait to grow up more and become
normal. My own experience with men and women in the
classroom and out on the ball field is that most are regular guys,
fairly rational, and are eager to plan their futures like anyone ten
years older. Nonetheless there are some who are taken by J.D.
Salinger's classic "The Catcher in the Rye," about this Holden
Caulfield preppie who has contempt for the world, who is
excessively judgmental, who doesn't fit in and winds up
institutionalized. This is not the kind of person you want to
emulate and you may not think much of the author's own life
style, but then happy, adjusted people don't usually make for
deep domestic drama while the characters in "The Good Girl"
do. And Mike White, who is quite talented as both a writer and
actor (his offbeat gem "Chuck and Buck," made for just a half a
mil two years back, was directed by the same fellow who
helmed "The Good Girl"), provides witty, sincere, believable
dialogue for his small-town Texas characters this time around
as well.
"The Good Girl" is about the fatal attraction that Tom "Holden"
Worther (Jake Gyllenhaal) has for a co-worker, Justine Last
(Jennifer Aniston) who rides the cash register a few meters
away from his own in The Retail Rodeo a clone of Woolworth's
that dominates the generic mall of the town. Worther is the
essential hero of Salinger's novel, which he reads and re-reads
when the cash registers are not singing. He insists on being
called Holden and has an I.D. tag to establish his truer self. At
just the right moment that both he and Justine realize that they
are leading lives of quiet desperation and itch to get out of their
rut, they take their lunchtime talks up a few notches to the local
motel. Trouble is that is married for the last seven years to a
pothead house painter, Phil (John C. Reilly) and has to put up
each night with her man's vapid conversations with his best
friend, Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson). As the conflicted prepares
to bolt her life with a guy eight years her junior a young man
who is no Tadpole but rather a drunk, a college dropout, a
loser the coils of a Greek-style tragedy tighten.
But unlike Greek tragedy, "The Good Girl" is down-to-earth,
with Miguel Arteta coaching comic vignettes from his mostly
sympathetic characters. Mike White's dialogue is spot on for
side characters like Cheryl (Zooey Deschanel), the heavily
made-up but sardonic and creative announcer of sales at the
Rodeo's microphone; like Corny (Mike White), a security guard
who tries to persuade Justine to join his weekly Bible study
group; like Tim Blake Nelson as Phil's best friend with more
than platonic interest in Justine; and John C. Reilly, a house
painter who looks content smoking pot but gives away his real
feelings when during a heavy rainstorm he states that he wishes
for a deluge so that he would never have to paint again.
Jennifer Aniston is best of all in a role playing more or less
against character. Not here do we find her in the superficially
amusing roles that he inhabited in Edward Burns's "She's the
One" and in Mike Judge's hilarious 1999 movie "Office Space."
With her hair in a bun that proclaims her girl-next-door good
looks and her eyes gazing into yet another daydream of an
escape from the banality of small-town life, she holds up as a
woman who could be the object of any sensitive guy's affection;
a good girl whose lust combines with her disaffection to cause
serious trouble in her marriage and in the lives of no small
number of people in the neighborhood.
Copyright © 2002 Harvey Karten
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out of 4
