The Good Girl
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Movie Reviews of The Good Girl
Movie Review: excellent
Summary: 5 Stars
Excellent acting, excellent characters. It had an interesting storyline that kept me curious. I loved it. Watched it last night- kept thinking about it today.Movie Review: The Good Girl
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm very pleased with my purchase from amazon. I really like Amazon for easy buying.
Thank you
Movie Review: Realities of life, Reality of choices made
Summary: 5 Stars
Excellent film: superbly directed, wonderful acting, emotional *human* story. No Hollywood ending here.Movie Review: an offbeat gem
Summary: 4 Stars
Jennifer Anniston gives a beautiful, heartfelt performance in "The Good Girl," a film totally in tune with the rhythms of everyday life. Anniston' Justine Last is just one of the many people inhabiting this Deep South, Bible Belt town who find themselves leading lives of quiet desperation, imprisoned by the dreary sameness of their daily routines. Justine works at one of those generic five-and-dime drug stores that so define the culture of Middle America. Yet, Justine's job and work environment are not the only sources of her frustration. She is also married to a well-meaning but dull blue collar worker who would rather spend the evening sitting on the sofa getting stoned with his partner than engage in any meaningful relationship-building with his wife. At the age of 30 then, Justine is ripe for some kind of life-changing experience when in walks Holden Worther, an introverted, obviously disturbed young co-worker who sees in Justine the very soul mate he has been searching for all his life, a person who will understand him and share his hatred for the life they are both leading. "The Good Girl" is really about the contrast between what we would like our lives to be and what they really are. Justine knows that the "easy" choice would be to pull up stakes and simply run away with Holden, abandoning a town, a marriage and a husband she has come lately to both abhor and despise. Yet, something keeps Justine rooted to the spot, something that makes her understand that any decision she makes will end up hurting someone in the end besides herself. Perhaps she sticks around because she realizes that, for all his faults, her husband is, in reality, a pretty decent guy overall and that he really does love her. Perhaps she also realizes that Holden is more mentally disturbed than she is willing to admit and that whatever life she might have with him would only mean exchanging one set of troubles for another. Credit the Mike White screenplay with exploring the complex nature of the film's characters and relationships. We never quite know where the story is headed or how all the issues will get resolved - if at all. As in real life, the story here keeps bumping up against new and ever more challenging complications and, because we can identify with the messiness, we are eager to go along with it wherever it chooses to take us. The film also does a fine job showing how life takes wholly unexpected turns at times, such as when a fairly major character dies unexpectedly. The casual suddenness of the death throws us for a loop since we so rarely see death portrayed that way in the movies.
Miguel Arteta's deadpan, matter-of-fact directorial style brings out the black comedy richness inherent in the material. Amid all the pain and sadness, there are a surprising number of genuine laughs in the film as we see our own lives reflected in the people and incidents there on the screen. Actually, the film reminds us a bit - in its music, its use of voiceover narration and its unromanticized view of rural life - of Terrance Malick's great 1973 film, "Badlands," a landmark in independent American filmmaking.
Anniston, who is probably in every scene in the film, carries the picture with her rich and highly empathetic performance. Even though her character is a woman slowly becoming deadened to the world around her, she still retains that spark of life and that absurd hope for the future that make her worthy to be the centerpiece of an intimate drama such as this one. Jake Gyllenhaal makes Holden both strangely appealing and a little frightening, so that, as Justine does, we come to admire his "uniqueness" of spirit (he has adopted his name from the main character of his favorite book "Catcher in the Rye") yet fear his increasing possessiveness. John C. Reilly as Justine's husband, Phil, and Deborah Rush as Gwen Jackson, Justine's sometime confidante at the store, also provide memorable, telling performances. In fact, there is nothing less than a superb performance in the entire film.
The question of whether or not Justine is really "a good girl" is, as it should be, left up to the individual viewer to answer. Some may feel she is; others may feel she's not. What really matters, though, is that "The Good Girl" doesn't try to impress us with the slickness that generally defines mainstream commercial filmmaking. Instead it lets its drama unfold in an unforced, believable manner, so that even its moments of greatest absurdity seem somehow strangely real and lifelike. It is a film that, in its own quiet, subtle way, manages to get under your skin - and keeps you thinking for a long time after you leave the theater.
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.