All the Real Girls

Having seen all but Undertow, I'm just about ready to name David Gordon Green as my favorite modern director. He combines Terrence Malick's visual acuity and his dialectic narratives with a focus on the normal day-to-day of people, creating films that do not adhere necessarily to the visual style of cinema verité (i.e. he doesn't follow his actors around like a documentarian) but arguably feel far more real. With his superb debut George Washington, he established himself as a name to watch, and his follow-up All the Real Girls only confirmed his position as one of America's most vibrant young filmmakers.

As with George Washington, All the Real Girls charts the lives of a small group of friends growing up in the South as they try to figure out what they want from life through semi-philosophical musings that somehow never seem out of place coming from the mouths of uneducated kids. Though the main characters in George Washington were black and here are white, it feels almost like a natural progression of the lives of the children in the debut: just as 12-year-old Nasia found herself in love for the first time, so too does 20-something Paul.

Paul (Paul Schneider) lives in a small town in the rural South, a town too small to contain his womanizing ways. He's slept with over 20 women, leaving only a few women in town remotely his age not to know him Biblically. Yet Paul has no real attachment with any of his conquests; one jilted lover mentions angrily that he dumped her after a few weeks without warning. His buddies -- the most noteworthy being Tip (Shea Whigham) and Bust-Ass (Danny McBride) -- view their friend as a demigod, a paradigm of virility.

But that all changes when Tip's young sister Noel (Zooey Deschanel) returns home after spending the last few years at boarding school. 18 and still a virgin, she soon falls madly in love with Paul. Paul has slept with every other woman in town, but he does not do the same with Noel. No, he understands that this one is special.

The film reaches a crossroads at this point; it could have very easily gotten lost and taken the well-trod path of films that use this sexual tension as the summation of the plot. Happily, Green is too smart for this, and he instead focuses on the deeper meanings and feelings of young love. Interestingly, Noel is open to sex with Paul; early on, she admits to Paul that she's a virgin "but I trust you." The look on Schneider's face comes rather close to one of terror in this moment; at last a man in a film understands the power he holds over a woman, and chooses to abandon it because the implications unsettle him.

The two bond so closely that their love manages to pierce that detached cloud that surrounds Green's film. He may take a cue or five from Malick's directing style, but Green's movies contain a great deal more humanism and sentimentality. Paul and Noel's relationship genuinely moved me, and struck me as a real relationship instead of a movie one: you know the kind, the ones that form through montages of everyday activities that become overblown for lame gags in order to show us a couple falling in love. Noel and Paul have no such montage; they hang out in this dreary little town and just remark on what about the other person captivates them, and every conversation brings them closer.

That does not mean that, like Before Sunrise, there is no conflict. In fact there are two. One is nearly mandatory: Tip, who used to revere Paul, now resents his friend and his ways for getting close to his sister. Another occurs around 2/3 of the way into the film, and it's too devastating for me to spoil even if this film was 40 years old. It wrenches things apart over the course of a few agonizing scenes; where once the relative silence around the actors let the sweetness take root naturally, now it highlights the quiet destruction of the notion of true love. The most rending of these scenes occurs in a bowling alley where even less is said than usual, and everything is communicated through body language and terrible silence.

Green is so completely focused on the relationship of his leads that he pays little attention to the other characters. Nevertheless, they all have their moments. Tip could have easily been the outraged older sibling, but we see glimpses into the pain he's feeling over the situation and suddenly the protests of all the older brothers in films don't seem so childish. Paul lives with his mother (Patricia Clarkson), which only shows how empty his prior "accomplishments" really are. She works as a birthday clown, because she knows that people will fork over money to please their kids far more than Wal-Mart will pay overtime. Bust-Ass mainly gets a lot of laughs, but he has a role to play in the tragedy of the final act.

If I said All the Real Girls ended on a high note, I'd be lying through my teeth, but it doesn't necessarily leave us depressed either. Green said in a DVD supplement that he wanted to make a film where things didn't just work out because people were in love, that love alone isn't always enough. He also remarked upon the necessity of making the film as a young man, before he looked back on the youth of this film with either jadedness or nostalgia. I agree; what he instead imbues the film with is the sense of loss that can only be conveyed in the moment. It is not filtered through the perspective of a person who moved on from heartbreak nor a sort of Gatsby character who never got over the pain; rather, we feel the agony of heartbreak as it happens, as well as that sense of hope -- be it futile or not -- that reconciliation is possible.

Snow Angels

A marching band practices their rendition of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer," only to be harshly berated for their sloppy lines and playing. After a few moments, gunshots ring out in the distance. Snow Angels, David Gordon Green's fourth film, shows the writer-director still displaying his ability to condense American life into 2 hours.

He focuses on a small town, small enough where the stories all converge with one another like a Robert Altman film, though Green does not structure his film the way Altman set up his tapestries. Of all these characters, Green primarily focuses on two: Arthur (Michael Angarano), a teenager in the marching band, and Annie (Kate Beckinsale), who forms the closest thing to a center in the story. Even these two are closely connected: Annie used to babysit Arthur (and was his first crush), and now the two work together in a local diner.

If George Washington examined friendship in post-Industrial, post-racial Appalachia, Snow Angels is a brutal look into relationships in a small town, where at some point everybody ends up screwing everybody else. Seemingly everyone in the film is either divorced or headed towards one. Annie is estranged from her husband Glenn (Sam Rockwell), an unstable Born-Again recovering alcoholic who seems to be perfectly affable and normal around everyone except Annie. Meanwhile Annie sleeps with the husband of her co-worker (played by Amy Sedaris). To top it all off, Arthur's parents are going through a separation.

Into all this turmoil Arthur experience love for the first time. Not his crush on Annie, but his muted and charming romance with Lila (Olivia Thirlby), a quirky girl with a winning personality. In a film where everyone else's relationships crumble around him, Arthur finds the only glimmer of happiness to be had, made all the more touching because of Green's tenderness towards them that never dips into mawkishness.

Halfway through the film, the film takes a darker tone. Glenn discovers his wife's infidelity and returns to his violent, drunken ways. Shortly afterwards, Tara (Glenn and Annie's daughter) goes missing. Soon Green plunges the story into an entirely different direction, one akin to Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter. For his part, Green handles the massive shift in direction as if nothing happened at all.

In the latter half Rockwell and Beckinsale really come alive, moving from broken, hollow people into characters vibrant in their rage and grief. The more Glenn sinks into alcoholism and religious fanaticism the more Annie grows to match him, and both actors bring their A-games. Rockwell in particular resonates; his violent reactions to the more horrifying events are moving, misguided and sinister as they may be.
Written and Directed by: David Gordon Green

At the end we finally discover the truth about those gunshots in the beginning, and to be honest it takes away a bit from the removed sensibility of the rest of the film. Really, the rest of the movie has been Green's baby, but here he must adhere to the book he adapted, and it just doesn't fit into his style. Yet Green pulls it back by ending on Arthur and Lila, who potentially have a future void of all the tragedies of the present, a future in which their love never dies. It's a bit sentimental, yes, but it works.

Though the two hemispheres of the story (Annie's and Arthur's) never overlap in more than superficial ways, together they form a haunting portrayal of community isolation, even in those small towns where everybody seems to know everybody. If its climax seems out of synch with the rest of the film, it's the result of the inevitable pull of the literary source on Green's separate and unique direction. That does not excuse the pieces not fitting, but neither does the film genuinely suffer for it. If nothing else, it ensures Green's place as perhaps the most humanist American director currently working, and I'll have my money in hand every time he releases a film.

George Washington

Written and Directed by: David Gordon Green

David Gordon Green seems poised for mainstream success with his excellent work on Pineapple Express. Regardless of what you think of that film, you can't deny that it looked beautiful, and it opens up a whole new career path for him as a hired hand. His impeccable direction got me curious, so I finally sought out his highly-acclaimed debut, George Washington. I didn't really know what to expect from it or what it was supposed to be about, so I sat down and strapped myself in for the ride.

What I got was one of the most beautiful, true portraits of America I've ever seen. Green's script is so thematically rich and universal it deserves immediate canonization into the pantheon of great cinematic portraits of American life, alongside Killer of Sheep and Do The Right Thing. It's stark, understated feel and documentary-like look only add to its realism; at certain points you begin to wonder if this is fiction at all.

George Washington focuses on a group of 5 black and white pre-teens growing up in the rural decay of Appalachia over the course of one summer. As the summer wears on, they will, although they don't realize it, slowly mature in a world that requires them to age too quickly. The events of the film are largely seen through the POV of Naisha, a 12-year old who narrates the film with voice-overs that alternate between exposition, character insight, and even random musings.

At the start of the film, Naisha dumps the loving but boring Buddy for the bizarre yet poetic George, a delicate boy who can play no sports or even submerge his head in water because the plates of his skull never fused when he was a baby. Buddy's friend Vernon tries to intervene and convince Naisha to return to her ex-. Vernon is never mean about it (though he does insult George a little), but that's only because he's protective of his friend, and also of Sonya, the youngest of the bunch. There's an innocence to these friendships tempered with the maturity that comes with forming true bonds; in a world that seems to have so little to offer them, the relationships between these five are their only marks on the planet.

Though essentially plotless, the film moves through a handful of events. But these serve to highlight the real messages of the film, those of poverty and race relations, of youth alienation and perplexity. Buddy, languishing in the grief of unrequited love, takes to wearing a dinosaur mask and delivers a soliloquy worthy of Shakespeare, had Shakespeare come from the rural South. Later, following a sudden and shocking tragedy, Vernon delivers one of his own. That these poor, young kids can deliver such poignancy and still seem like real people is testament not only to Green's deft hand but the charm and believability of the non-professional actors.

The tragedy of the film gets offset somewhat when George performs a heroic action, and we see that the adults of this world are as confused as the children. It all boils down into a minimalistic portrait of real life. No one has all the answers and the youth aren't as naive as you might think. As for the title? As best I as I can figure, George morphs into such a leader as the titular American hero, capable of inspiring these directionless youth and maybe adding a dash of hope in their lives. If the film meanders in places, it is because the characters, as in real life, don't have a clue where life will take them. Beautifully shot and poignantly written, George Washington is an absolute treat.

Pineapple Express

This year has already given us one great Apatow Production in Forgetting Sarah Marshall (still the funniest film of the year so far), but the second Seth Rogen-Evan Goldberg written film, Pineapple Express, gives it a decent run for its money. It’s not as well crafted as FSM, but, like that film, doesn’t go more than a few minutes without raising a laugh.

The story follows Dale Denton, a processing server who loves weed, and his amiable drug dealer Saul, who flee a drug supplier (Ted Jones, played by Gary Cole), his hitmen, and corrupt cops after Dale witnesses Ted murdering a member of a rival drug supplier. What follows is a hilarious if slightly uneven mash of action and comedy, and it’s sure to entertain.


Seth isn’t really exploring new ground here. All his characters are slight tweaks on a core model: in 40 Year Old Virgin, he was a gruff but lovable schlub whose was eloquent enough to get laid. In Superbad he was a simple cop who used his position to try to look cool. In Knocked Up, he was just a schlub full stop, initially a prick but eventually lovable. Here, he’s a pathetic schlub thrust into an impossible scenario. Seth’s kind of a chubby Tom Hanks playing Tom Hanks. He’s just different enough in each role to not make me worry for his acting future the way I do for Michael Cera, but he’s still getting a little too one-note for comfort.

James Franco, however, puts in the performance of his career. In the Spider-Man films, I found him great as the pained kid who just wanted his father’s love, but I found him insufferable, whiny, and completely un-intimidating when he became the New Goblin. Here, he positively inhabits the role of Saul, capturing all the blankness of a habitual pot smoker without going out of his way to highlight his short term memory loss or his empty-headedness as well as making him lovable. It’s a strange year when, in the first 7 months, the two finest acting performances are a clown villain in a comic book film and a stoner in an action-comedy.

After Dale witnesses the murder (and they don’t mess around, you only have to wait about 8-10 minutes before the plot gets underway), the two ineptly dodge Ted’s vengeance: they run to the woods but forget that Ted’s bought cops can track their cell phones. Even when it dawns upon Saul, they don’t take proper steps. They go see Red, Saul’s middleman supplier who buys from Ted and sells to Saul, even though common sense would dictate that Red would be the first person Ted went to. From there it spirals into an explosive, if predictable action-comedy that errs on the side of action.

The focus of the jokes isn’t so much one-liners (though there are plenty of those), but in capturing the absurdity of Dale and Saul’s situation. Conversations are jumbled; everyone frantically talks over one another, making lines hard to filter out. I, however, like this method, because too many comedies let people in an argument speak one at a time so jokes can be heard. Here, it feels like you’re really watching two paranoid stoners who (quite rightly) think they are going to die at any second. The comedy only gets better when Red is introduced. He is at first an asshole and seemingly an antagonist, but, in the film’s third act, manages to steal the show even from James Franco. He’s crazy, simple, and screamingly funny. By the end of the film, he is somehow alive and somehow the best part of the film.

The action scenes are too jump-cutty, but they are where the film stands out. There is a massive fistfight, car chase, and a massive ending gunfight to keep you entertained. The scenes convey a great deal of the film’s humor, yet they are fairly decent action scenes in their own right. It’s not nearly as good a blend of humor and action as Hot Fuzz, but it’s a damn sight funnier than just about anything else out this year.

It’s not all great, though. Seth’s girlfriend serves no purpose other than to make him look pathetic, and her story ends abruptly and unsatisfyingly. My biggest complaint is actually Gary Cole. I love Gary, but he’s at best mediocre as a crazed drug supplier and, at worst, awful. His right hand man is a corrupt cop, played by Rosie Perez, who one can actually understand these days. Both mistake Dale and Saul for professionals sent by their rivals The Asians. Mistaking idiots for pros is uncomfortable familiar to Dumb & Dumber and a host of other films, and this doesn’t really feel unique enough to forgive that. Also, there is a predictable romance between Cole and Perez that is forced and doesn’t even manage to be funny in a “hey look how forced this is” way.


Anyone who goes into this film hoping for a great pot comedy will be crushingly disappointed; pot is merely the MacGuffin here. However, I was relieved; there are few things less funny than pot humor, and I was afraid the film would be a misfire. In fact, not only is the film not pot humor, it shows the flaws of stoners. Don’t get me wrong, the film is purely pro-pot, but Rogen and Goldberg write two stoners who are lovable but pathetic. Dale is in a job that requires little effort just so he can smoke all the time, and he is dating a high school girl. She keeps begging him to meet her parents, but he is scared, which is probably smart since she borders on jailbait. Saul is even sadder: he sits in his apartment watching old 227 reruns surrounded by electronic gadgets so he never has to leave. Pot comedies beat you over the head with how guys who are normally losers are thrust into a magical world of adventure and hot chicks when they smoke pot. Pineapple Express shows two guys who could possibly survive their ordeal if they’d just stop smoking for 2 hours.

As I said, there’s too much action and not enough comedy, but James Franco and Danny McBride make this movie and keep me rolling for the entire film. Gary Cole was weak, but I think the writing has as much to do with that as his portrayal. It’s not the best film I’ve seen, but I must say I laughed more than I do with all but the best of comedies.