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ALL
THE REAL GIRLS
7/10
USA 2003
: David Gordon Green : 108mins
All the
Real Girls is the story of two twentysomething American men fumbling
awkwardly towards maturity. On-screen we have Paul (Paul Schneider), an
easygoing 22-year-old mechanic, living with his mother Elvira (Patricia
Clarkson) in small-town North Carolina and struggling to cope with his
first serious adult romance. Off-screen there’s writer-director David
Gordon Green, a 27-year-old making his sophomore movie after 2000’s acclaimed
George Washington.
Paul hasn’t
quite made the transition to responsibility: his relationship with his
best friend’s sister Noel (Zooey Deschanel) is a tentative business, imperilled
by both parties’ awareness of his long-standing reputation as the local
hot-dogging Lothario. And Green himself has some way to develop – All
the Real Girls hovers precariously on the edge of affectation and
self-indulgence, not least in the script department. Was it, for instance,
really necessary to make Elvira a professional clown?
And though
the film’s end credits (and publicity materials) reveal our hero and heroine’s
names, these crucial details are coyly withheld during the movie itself.
Likewise, the title ‘All the Real Girls’ is never spoken or otherwise
explained – we’re clearly supposed to take this as a mood-piece without
specific meanings or straightforward answers. Direction-wise, Green is
rather too fond of the heavy-handedly ‘lyrical’ incidental music which
he uses to bind together his short, fragmentary, naturalistic scenes of
this rural small town (mostly filmed in Marshall, NC) and its inhabitants
- the atmospheric cinematography is courtesy of Tim Orr.
Watching All
The Real Girls, the viewer may suspect that endless footage was shot,
with the performers given much latitude to improvise within the guidelines
of their characters, before Green (and editors Zene Bakel and Steven Gonzales)
sat down to organise them into a rough, slowburning narrative form – perhaps
it’s no accident that the poster’s tagline reads ‘Love is a puzzle – these
are the pieces.’ Luckily for all concerned, the actors without exception
seem to ‘get’ what Green is doing, and respond with convincing characterisations:
the dialogue sounds fresh and believable, the action seeming to develop
organically out of the personalities involved. As Noel’s brother Tip,
Shea Whigham has the easygoing hipster charisma of a young Kevin Bacon,
and turns in such a vivid turn he rivals ‘Queen of the Indies’ Clarkson
among supporting-cast honours.
But this is
very much Paul’s story, and in many ways it’s Schneider’s film – he collaborated
with Green on the story and script. Refreshingly, the actor isn’t quite
conventional leading-man material - imagine a young, slighty overweight
Scott Bakula - and he builds a compellingly figure out of this superficially
‘ordinary’ young bloke. By the time we get to the film’s ambiguous finale
- and nicely upbeat coda – Paul has emerged as a genial and surprisingly
touching figure, one very much worth spending a couple of hours with.
Green likewise
does more than enough to indicate real talent: as a scriptwriter, he’s
to be commended for avoiding melodrama: this is the rare young-romance
movie that gets by without a third-act tragedy. If anything, however,
Green tries a little too hard to avoid the usual histrionics of
movie romances – as a drama, All the Real Girls feels a little
under-powered. As in real life, not a great deal actually happens – Paul
and Noel’s relationship does come under severe test, but this is as much
a result of communication problems as actual events themselves: the pair
are way too articulate for their own good most of the time, then prove
unable to verbalise their real feelings when a real crisis does arise.
Just occasionally, Green gives the pair some truly awful lines – including
one desperately ‘wacky’ bit of dialogue about the invention of peanut
butter.
In terms of
directing, however, Green is much closer to the finished article: there’s
one sublime moment, when Paul joins Elvira at work and the pair improvise
a clown-dance to an audience of hospitalised children, that achieves truly
Altmanesque heights of inspired looseness, a blissful synchronicity of
acting, camerawork and music. It isn’t a long sequence, but it’s enough
to suggest Green is likely to take high rank among American directors
as his career progresses: next up is The Undertow, apparently followed
by an attempt at John Kennedy Toole’s ‘unfilmable’ novel A Confederacy
of Dunces. Green, it seems, certainly won’t fail for lack of nerve.
22nd
July, 2003 : comprehensive rewrite of original review (written 16th
February)
(film seen 7th February, Cinemaxx Berlin – Berlin Film Festival : market
[also showing in Forum section])
For all the
reviews from the Berlin Film Festival click here.
by Neil
Young
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