The Good Girl
by Miguel Arteta
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Deborah Rush, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jennifer Aniston, John Carroll Lynch, Mike WhiteDirector: Miguel Arteta
Brand: ANISTON,JENNIFER
Writer: Mike White
Producer: Carol Baum
Producer: Gina Kwon
Producer: Kirk D'Amico
Producer: Matthew Greenfield
Producer: Philip von Alvensleben
Producer: Shelly Glasser
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled)
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 93 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-01-07
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Movie Reviews of The Good Girl
Movie Review: "The difficulty in life is the choice"-George Moore
Summary: 4 Stars
Poor, pitiful Justine (Jennifer Aniston) works her days away in a dreary predictable discount store and returns home at day's end to her painter husband and his slimy sidekick, who together spend their nights ensconced on the couch smoking dope and watching mindless television. We see in her listless, slumped shoulder walk the look of desperation and resignation. How can we feel anything but empathy and pity for Justine, for the life to which she has been condemned? Is the director making us a witness to yet another yarn about the stifling dullness and persistent hopelessness of the small town cocoon?
One day out of the fog of dreariness and predictability a new male employee at Justine's place of employment catches her eye. The young man, who is roughly 9 years her junior, is, as we discover, a candidate in good standing for bipolar poster child of the year. The young man has shed his "Slave Name" Tom and adopted the name of Holden, because he sees himself as the embodiment of the main character in Catcher in the Rye. Justine is attracted to his impetuous and flamboyant personality, because she sees in him an escape from her horrid dull life. As the relationship develops and moves from the mental and spiritual to the physical, Justine withdrawals more and more from her friends and responsibilities. She and her beau nouveau are lost in each other and the possibility of a better life somewhere else. All is going swimmingly until Justine and her Holden are discovered by Justine's husband's sidekick as they emerge from the hotel room after one of their romps in their field of dreams. Things get very complicated after that.
As a result of being found out Justine is forced to make other compromises to hide the extent of her relationship with Holden. This is very taxing for Justine and at one time she even considers religion as an answer to her dilemma. Holden also becomes very upset when he discovers some of what Justine has done to cover up their dalliances. To the very end Justine makes decisions and lies to protect herself, while Holden tragically disappears from the picture.
What is the lesson, message or insight that we the viewer should take away from this movie. At first glance it seems a simple tale about the consequences of the choices we make in life. Each step we take will to a great extent determine what the next step after that will be. After letting this movie run around in my head for a few days, I have decided that the Good Girl is perhaps the psychological dialectic to the Garden of Eden story. In Eden, Adam and Eve had everything they needed to make them happy and in The Good Girl, Justine and Holden believed that because of where they lived and how they lived that they had nothing of what they needed to make them happy, to fulfill there dreams. Out of these two different worlds, one full of hope and one, from full of despair we see the rise of the same human impulse to break away, to change, even though, the provocations that engendered the need to change things were different, both Adam and Eve and Justine and Holden had to change because the sameness of their lives was too stifling. Perhaps the lesson is that it is ok to break away, to explore more deeply that which makes us human, but do so with your eyes open. Who knows? maybe God wanted Adam and Eve to leave Eden. Perhaps the lesson is that what we don't have always looks more appealing and feels more desirable than what we do have, and the key is not getting what we want but wanting what we have. In both cases, I think we do have a choice, and for that, we are always responsible.
Summary of The Good Girl
Jennifer Aniston turns in "a fantastic performance" (Us Weekly) in this quirky comedy about first encounters and second chances. Thirty-year-old Justine Last (Aniston) longs for a life more fulfilling than the one she leads with her boring husband (John C. Reilly) and dead-end job a the Retail Rodeo. But when a passionate young co-worker (Jake Gyllenhaal) catches her eye and steals her heart, Justine's good-girl existences takes a turn for the worse- with unexpected and comical results.Jennifer Aniston gives a career-changing performance in The Good Girl, a movie that questions whether goodness is a virtue or a trap. Justine (Aniston), weary of her dead-end retail job and her childless marriage to Phil (John C. Reilly), diverts herself with a new coworker named Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal), who feels as ill-treated by his life as Justine does with hers. The empathy between them leads, all too quickly, to an affair--which just as quickly turns into an obsession that threatens to destroy Justine's marriage. But this is only the beginning; Phil's buddy Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson), the store security guard (Mike White), and a handful of other characters all have a part to play in the unraveling of Justine's life. The script and performances of The Good Girl are subtle but vivid, and the movie's emotional impact will linger long after the movie is over. --Bret Fetzer
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