The characters are largely caricatures, to be sure, but there's a good deal of truth behind the simplicity of their facades.
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Jennifer Aniston has just the right face for a title like this, don't you think? Everybody's favorite fictional TV character since 1994, Rachel Green, from "Friends" has that sweet, innocent, angelic look that has worked so well for her in lightweight comedy and here works equally well in a darker, more ironic way. "The Good Girl" is a welcome change of pace for the actress and shows us once again that she's more than a pretty face.
That said, I'm not sure every viewer is going to appreciate Ms. Aniston in so downbeat a role. As for myself, I know I liked the film and Aniston's character for the story's first thirty minutes or so, but after that I began to grow weary under the weight of it all.
Aniston plays a thirty-year-old woman named Justine, living in Texas, working a dead-end job at a Retail Rodeo department store, and stuck in a childless, dead-end marriage to a deadhead husband (John C. Reilly). If that isn't the end of the world, I don't know what is. Then she meets a fellow cashier at the store, a young man (Jake Gyllenhaal), aged twenty-two, whose name is Tom but who calls himself Holden, after the main character in J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye."
You can't much blame Justine for not being happy. Her husband, Phil, is a house painter with no ambition beyond getting high every night in front of the television with his good-ol'-boy buddy, Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson). But why does Justine fall for a kid like Tom? He claims to be an unpublished writer and a college dropout; what we know for sure is he's quiet and a loner. Both he and Justine hate their jobs and hate life and hate the world in general.
Justine and Tom are kindred spirits who find comfort in one another's arms. She's lonely, he's immature, and they're both stupid. It's a measure of their romantic creativity that they meet for their first romantic tryst in front of a Chuck E. Cheese's.
The characters are largely caricatures, to be sure, but there's a good deal of truth behind the simplicity of their facades. Their plight--including Justine's, the pathetic husband's, Bubba's, and Justine's fellow store workers (Deborah Rush, Mike White, John Carroll Lynch)--is universal; we all know people like them, heaven help us. Indeed, to some extent we may be like one or more of them ourselves.
The stories Tom writes are remarkably depressing, and we are reminded at the outset by Tom that Salinger's rebellious character wound up in a mental hospital. Why Justine is drawn to him is both obvious and mysterious. Part of the movie's problem is that Justine herself is an enigma. She appears at times to be extremely bright and sensitive while at other times extremely dull and cloddish. Her affair with the younger, mentally disturbed Tom is conducted practically in the open, in motel rooms around town and in one of the store's back rooms with security cameras everywhere.
The darker comedic elements of the film are the best parts: the incidental death of a coworker, for instance; the unlikely scenario that develops between Justine and Bubba; or Phil's attempts to have his semen analyzed at a hospital. But the movie abandons the dark comedy and the satire about halfway through, and the bittersweet ending leaves a slightly sour taste in the mouth. Worse, the ending hasn't the shock value it was intended to have because most of it can easily be foretold well in advance. Even as a parody of middle-class vacuousness, the movie may not be funny enough, vicious enough, or original enough to fully satisfy many viewers. "American Beauty" and Gyllenhaal's own "Donnie Darko" covered the same ground better before.
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[release]10683[/release]