3/4/03
Spinning Gently Out Of Time
I’ll be very blunt about this: All The Real Girls is a mess of a film. It’s not completely bad – I think that it could definitely be edited into a halfway decent 30 minute short film; but left to the devices of its writer/director David Gordon Green, it is padded out with unnecessary scenes and pointless selfindulgence which ultimately makes the film come across as the work of an amateur with some signs of potential.
All The Real Girls is the story of Paul, a somewhat charismatic jerk from a small rural town somewhere in the south. Paul eventually ends up in a relationship with his best friend’s younger sister Noel, who has just returned from her stay at an all-girls boarding school. Understandably, many of the characters in the story are wary of Paul’s intentions because of his reputation for sleeping with nearly every attractive girl he meets and eventually breaking all of their hearts. The relationship carries on until Noel has a moment of drunken infidelity, and Paul reacts in the most selfish and wrong-headed way possible.
The plot isn’t anything special, but it makes a virtue of its banality by letting the story play itself out naturalistically for most of the film. The best parts of the movie are the scenes in which Noel and Paul interact with other under less than dramatic circumstances, and the film keeps it focus squarely on the dynamics of those two characters. Green has a gift for capturing realistically awkward conversational rhythms and letting his inarticulate characters communicate themselves mostly through subtext. However, when the characters have to actually say what they really mean it usually just ends up sounding like like bad poetry or Oscar-reel histrionics. There’s plenty of parts in the film which don’t feel natural at all; scenes which either seem stilted due to the limitations of the actors, Green’s direction, or the script’s reliance on indie/art film cliches.
It’s hard not to be distracted by Green’s selfindulgence, as he sabotages his story by cluttering it with one-dimensional supporting characters who are never developed or have any particular relevance to the main plot but fill up a significant chunk of screen time. Other characters, such as Noel’s brother Tip or Paul’s mother Elvira, who both have larger roles in the film, are absent for so much of the film that when they both have their requisite breakdown scenes at the end, it’s hard to care very much about them. Tip is crucial to the story, but is never given enough screen time to develop beyond being anything more than an angry, depressive drunk. Why should the audience care if the guy has just knocked up some girl he barely knows when we barely know him? The same goes for Elvira – though it’s very sad that she is broke and lonely, and that Paul is almost completely inconsiderate of her emotions or her livelihood, is there any reason for her histrionics other than to tug at our heartstrings?
The pacing of the film is rambling to say the least. The scene-to-scene flow seems jagged and incongruent, and many scenes begin and end abruptly as if someone was watching the film on DVD and was occasionally advancing foward out of (understandable) boredom. Green does himself few favors by including a handful of selfconciously ‘arty’ scenes which do nothing to advance or enhance the narrative. The most egregious example would be the scene in which Paul and Noel converse while leaning on each other’s bodies so that they form a square with the floor in the middle of a lane at an empty bowling alley. It’s nothing more than a visual nonsequitor which pulls the viewer out of the story momentarily so that the hand of the filmmaker can be foregrounded. There’s another scene late in the film in which the story stops dead in its tracks so that we can watch Paul and his friends race cars around a homemade Nascar track. It seems to me that Green simply wanted to shoot that scene for the fun of it, and not because it advanced the story or characters at all. It’s almost as if Green was conciously cramming all of these pointless scenes and characters into the film so that if he was never again given the money to make another film, he would have been able to say that he at least stuffed as much as he could into All The Real Girls. I can imagine the man ticking off a checklist: Time-lapse montage of sunsets – check. Retarded kid – check. Dumb redneck sidekick – check.
Another problem that I have with the film is that Green’s professed desire to keep the film out of time results in a movie in which the characters and events seem entirely removed from the context of the contemporary United States. No one in the film shows any interest in culture or the world outside of their miserable little town, which I find hard to believe given that the story seems to be taking place somewhere between now and the mid-70s. There’s no evidence of television, music, newspapers, movies, sports, fashion, or any other kind of distraction save for drinking at social gatherings and bars. The absence of chain stores is made very conspicuous. Are we really to believe that this town is so incredibly dreary that nobody does anything other than work, mope, drink, and fuck? That may be a reality of a town like this, but it does seem a little too convenient that every character in the film would be equally uninspired and dull, and I am deeply suspicious of a filmmaker who would go out of his way to create a film full of such thoroughly joyless characters.
Other People Write Blogs Too, You Know…
Chris Conroy and Shroom from Milk Plus both remind me of why I definitely don’t ever want to pay to see The Hours. They confirm every bad feeling I’ve had about the movie based on what I’ve read and having seen that awful, awful, AWFUL trailer a few times over. Which is good, because I was starting to think about throwing my hands up in the air and seeing the film anyway, just so I could chime in on conversations about it. Thanks, guys.
The Adaptation blog on Susan Orlean’s site reports that the DVD of the movie won’t include any bonuses in favor of higher quality sound and visuals. This is very unfortunate. As whoever writes that blog (Susan herself? Jason Kottke?) notes, Adaptation is a film that would lend itself to bonuses rather well, and it’s too bad they won’t be doing anything with it. It’s not the biggest shock to me, though – Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman didn’t include a commentary track for Being John Malkovitch, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t for this film either. It probably is a better decision to keep the film free of a commentary track and let it speak for itself, as not to push one interpretation of the film on the viewer.
