All the Real Girls

All the Real Girls

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Movie Reviews of All the Real Girls

Movie Review: Love Without the Story
Summary: 5 Stars

The heart, as it happens, seems to be at the core of Green's work. It takes center stage in GIRLS, which essentially boils down to boy sleeps around, then boy meets girl, then boy and girl fall in love, then....nothing. That's it. Simple, but far from simplistic.

Written by Green from a story by Green and star Paul Schneider, ALL THE REAL GIRLS takes a universal premise and injects it with such singular and unpretentious beauty, both visually (care of GEORGE WASHINGTON DP Orr) and rhythmically, that what emerges is less a story than cinematic truth. With a love story, that's an astonishing accomplishment.

Green sets the tone of the film with the opening scene, in which Paul (Schneider) and Noel (Zooey Deschanel) have already come together. There are no Meet Cutes here. She wants to kiss him. He wants to kiss her back, probably for the first time knowing why he wants to kiss a girl, but he knows his past, and more importantly, so does Noel's older brother, Paul's best friend Tip (Shea Whigham), and he can't bring himself to do it. Their compromise is an in-between moment, the kind love deals in almost exclusively, where you've begun a moment that you don't know how to end, so you do the first thing that comes to your mind and inevitably it leads to something else.

In the next scenes we meet Paul up close, his friends, his town, and we are given glimpses into the mechanics of his everyday relationships. These scenes are subtly informed with history, through in-jokes and familiarity. We hear the gossip. We see some of the local haunts and the ever present mill. Noel, who has been away at an all girls boarding school, has not yet returned home, but the boys talk about her. She's introduced casually, the way such important people often are, and Paul stumbles, as we might, onto a friendship without a friendship's boundaries. Tip is enraged to find his sister warming so cozily to Paul, knowing what he does about Paul's past. Or maybe there's more to it. Paul's mother, Elvira, played almost unrecognizably under a brunette thatch of unkempt hair by the great Patricia Clarkson, wonders if Noel is good enough for her son, but more tellingly she wonders if her son is good enough for Noel. In this relationship we observe the seed of Paul's way with women. His easygoing charm, wit and comfort with women are a byproduct of the everyday flirtation he shares with his mother.

Basically the film takes off from there, but this is a film where what happens is not nearly as important as how it happens. Love is not literal. It does not express itself in monologues and perfectly timed one liners and neatly packaged conflict-climax-resolution where dialogue is the set up and sex the punchline. Love is irregular, asymmetrical, unruly. Conversation is exploration, not exposition. You take steps blindly into large-mouthed moments. Green strings together vignettes, lit naturally by Orr, where Paul and Noel fumble around one other, searching for the best part of themselves in the other. But neither knows what to look for, and neither knows the way to find it. That the film understands love in such a fundamental way is what transcends the storytelling. You feel this love exists because it does not pretend to know what it does not know.

ALL THE REAL GIRLS, in the end, is not a story of how things begin or end, but how they continue. As in life or love, there is no resolution, only mistakes to be made, forgiveness to be asked for and lessons to be learned.

Summary of All the Real Girls