Cinema Hype

The opening of David Gordon Green’s 2003 indie film All the Real Girls is breathtaking: a young man and an even younger woman stand on a sidewalk at night, or maybe it’s in an alley, and share their first kiss–on the palm of the hand. It’s the beginning of a love story, but it feels like it might actually be the middle, or maybe getting towards the end. It feels real. Everything’s getting off to a sweet, kooky, and beautifully filmed start.

And then the rest of the movie happens. Turns out the man, Paul (Paul Schneider), is a notorious womanizer in a small North Carolina town; she, Noel (Zooey Deschanel), is an eighteen-year-old virgin home from boarding school. They fall in love. If that were the end of it, things would be fine–flawed characters trying to figure out true love makes for a compelling story, surely enough to fill the entire hour and forty-eight minutes. It’s all the little extra tacked-on things, the obvious indie-film quirkier-than-thou elements, that are problematic. Along with Paul and Noel, we get their families and friends, small-town rivalries and moments with the local kids. It’s supposed to be realistic, weird in the way that the world is weird, but instead it comes across as studied and, in the worst cases, a little embarrassing. As the story unfolds and becomes more and more dramatic, things get worse and worse. Patricia Clarkson’s even there, doing what she does best as the sad, wasted mother. This is definitely her kind of movie.

The frustrating thing here is that so much of what’s wrong isn’t really wrong. It’s not that Green doesn’t know a good thing; it’s more that he doesn’t know where to stop: the supporting characters are too quirky, the dialogue is too lyrical. It feels indulgent, like Green couldn’t bear to cut out the bits he liked best (though we hear that an entire first act about Paul’s philandering past was cut during editing), so that everything’s just a little bit precious. On the other hand, when he leaves well enough alone, some truly lovely moments shine through.

And there are some things to love in All the Real Girls. Zooey Deschanel (next up as Janis Joplin!) and Paul Schneider are both excellent, natural on camera and transparent in a way that probably gives the script an extra measure of grace. It’s a beautiful film, all lit with gold and interspersed with images of North Carolina in the fall. The score is simple, guitar-y, evocative of autumn and mountains and smoke. There’s that first scene, and some other simple, sad moments sprinkled throughout. In some ways, it’s exactly what it should be. And in some ways, it’s way too much.

All the Real Girls, DVD reviews, Zooey Deschanel, Paul Schneider, David Gordon Green