All The Real Girls

by Shari L. Rosenblum

Much like romance itself, romantic movies sometimes work when they shouldn't, and don't when they should. All the Real Girls, the sophomore effort of David Gordon Green (George Washington), is of the latter sort. With beautiful photography and a purported belief in magic of the heart, it aches to reach us, to touch us in all the right places, but winds up making nothing at all out of love.

The screenplay, which Green also wrote, unfolds languidly in a small North Carolina mill town among a group of down and out, uneducated, unclassed locals who are neither interesting nor amusing (a kind of Southern cross between Revenge of the Nerds and Breaking Away's "Cutters," with a dollop of SubUrbian aimless angst). Opening on a lovers' gaze, and a portentous question about why the kiss never follows, it tells a story of first love: on one side, Noel, an 18-year-old virgin fresh from six years at an all-girl boarding school, and on the other, Paul, a 22-year-old cad, best friend of Noel's older brother, his "partner in crime."

The film has been hailed as lyrical and unaffected, the way first love is dreamed of, but it is, to the contrary, archingly off tone and insidiously dishonest. Based on a story by Paul Schneider (George Washington), who also plays the lead, the film works off the stereotypes of first-love recountings, and does the audience more dastardly than any flightly lover might.

Starting at the traditional start point, All the Real Girls sets us up with trepidation. We are meant to worry for Noel (Zooey Deschanel, Almost Famous), enticing and seductive, as she seems to fall unwittingly under the ostensible Lothario's spell. We are meant, at the same time, to distrust and disdain even the tenderest gesture of Paul, the town hound dog, whose knavish past (with imagistic analogies scattered badly here and there) makes members of his barely literate would-be posse show themselves alternately articulate about the troubles he's caused and imitative of his imagined swagger. But Paul's past is never more than dialogic exposition - there's nothing in the character, other than his good looks and a couple of inserted nasty one-offs in flash back or retribution, to make it remotely convincing. He lacks style, he lacks smarm, he lacks sureness in his step. Scenes with his mother (an effective Patricia Clarkson, given awkward lines and bad scenes), who works as a clown entertaining in a children's hospital, show him to be childish and immature. And there's even less evidence of Noel's supposed trusting self-exposing innocence (nor any trace of her six years of boarding school). So when the characters are meant to turn around and surprise us, to change in the ways young love changes, it comes as no surprise at all. Because there was never any reason to believe it was any other way.

Zooey Deschanel can enchant, and there are moments when you understand why someone with the reputation of Paul would fall for her Noel. She uses trust in the way the roué uses charm. It is a tool of manipulation. Paul Schneider is as persuasive as the role allows him to be. But the film is built on myths of character types that it seems not to know how to build. We are forced to watch scenes contrived by someone's late night imaginings of the way things should have been in romances now past, with requisite confessions of untold secrets and tender kisses of palms and the freedom to dance unwatched. Sexual encounters are drawn with heavy-breath headiness in the way of indie films, and holding back is given the old-world sense of caring even more. (As to the inevitable consequences to the man who withholds in the woman's honor, the film follows such sophisticated storylines as the TV trials of Joey and Dawson or Felicity and Noel). It is more than banal.

Rounding out the tale with the wary brother, the retarded child, the ethnic child, and the mournful uncle, the film drags through the muck of faux depth and despair. And by the falseness of each step, the flatness of each chord, portraits designed to be realistic clunk and screech and dissuade - and she grows more and more unlikeable as he grows more and more pitiable. Neither moves us nor compels us. We just want it to be over.

And then finally, it is over. In the showing I saw, a third of the arthouse audience walked out before the boredom overtook them. As to the rest, they stayed, but seemed as regretful as I that they hadn't listened to that voice inside of them telling them to get out sooner, knowing as we come to know that such things, as beautiful as they may be, are never worth our time.

©2003 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene