marcie’s idiot pick of the week: all the real girls
Posted by rollinsloane on 9 January 2008
Because Zooey Deschanel is, like, sooooo cute and Paul Schneider is, you know, kinda dreamy, my soft-hearted/minded roommate Marcie brought home All the Real Girls this evening and plied me into vegetative submission with goblets of cheap pinot noir and assurances that this, unlike Across the Universe, was a Sundance favorite. Indeed. Well. Marcie was right. All the Real Girls did win an award at Sundance — a Special Jury Prize for Emotional Truth. If the AV Club’s resident Hater Amelie Gillette feels like adding an Irony Award to her intermittent round-ups of useless movie award shows, then I’ve got a contender. All the Real Girls (2003), written and directed by David Gordon Green (soon to go mainstream at the helm of upcoming Apatow comedy Pineapple Express), is not so much emotionally true as achingly, desperately indie, vying for the genre like it’s some sort of title and in the process fulfilling every convention of the supposedly unconventional.
Not that it’s a travesty or anything so very terrible. Zooey is the very essence of winsome, and Schneider is an affable Tom Hanks-style leading man. He’s not a hunk. He’s a winsome oaf — the perfect small-town catch, and thus right at home in Girls‘ rural-industrial North Carolina setting. Schneider does not, however, exude the callousness necessary to portray the ruthless local lothario which the script repeatedly insists that he is. Instead, Schneider seems totally at home with the timid sweetness of his semi-forbidden romance with Zooey, the lil sister of one his closest and similarly playboy friends, rather than freshly initiated into the sort of gentle love that holds off sex for the sake of establishing commitment. To be sure, they make for an endearing pair — it’s just too bad that their particular brand of chemistry doesn’t quite fit the story arc of Green’s surrounding plot. Their tepid relationship runs over trap doors (she’s a virgin) and road-bumps (suddenly, without his assistance, she’s no longer a virgin) but always remains relentlessly grounded, moored in the shallow present rather than pursuing any future or depth.
Village Voice’s J. Hoberman succinctly sums the whole film up: “alternately poignant and ridiculous, opaque and garrulous, All the Real Girls [has a] taste for absurd gravitas and useless beauty.” Zooey and Schneider moon about the rusting junkyards and sunset fields of their small mountain town in clips and phrases as the films dips jarringly in and out of their individual narratives, popping in beneath a patch of streetlight for whispers of shared misgivings or hovering over their pillow for earnestly gaping looks. Salon.com’s Stephanie Zacharek, she of the relentlessly caustic quip, pinpoints precisely where our affection for their affection begins to dull into an eyeroll: “As Paul and Noel’s relationship progresses, she utters lines like, “I had a dream that you grew a garden on a trampoline and I was so happy that I invented peanut butter,” proving that the unedited sharing of dreams and feelings is truly one of the scourges of romantic love.”
The movie’s filmy aesthetic additionally develops an occasional penchant for rigorously quirky visuals, cute scenes like this that go entirely unexplained:
Why are they hugging like that? Why are they in a bowling alley? Why are they in the middle of a bowling lane? The answer is: it doesn’t matter. It’s just indie.
They’re just indie; in other words, so “real” they ring fake. And ultimately, we just don’t get to know them that well.
I’ll leave you with Zacharek’s closing thoughts:
At one point in their mechanically quirky courtship [zing!], Paul tells Noel, “I wanna dance, but I don’t want you to watch.” She turns her back, and he stands behind her for a moment before breaking into a wild yet awkward shimmy. It’s easy to see what the scene signifies: Paul yearns to be completely himself, with Noel or with someone, yet he just can’t let go. But Green gives us far too many seconds to drink in this sight before cutting away, and every spare second tells us how pleased he is with this little scenario, with his unorthodox characters and their confused, fragile, wacky feelings.
– Sloane
