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/movies/153116/very-good-girls
Review of Very Good Girls
by Jeff Light
Posted on August 4th, 2022
Neutral 6
Overall Rating
 
+
so i'm sitting in a rented bungalow in panama, stuck watching tv because i'm in the middle of nowhere and didn't realize it would be a holiday and there is literally not a taxi working, not an uber, no transportation whatsoever and nothing within walking distance. my spanish is so-so, but not enough to keep up with most of the spanish-dubs on films shown on tv there, and this one was actually playing in english. i stop channel-surfing to debate for a full 5 minutes if this is elle or dakota fanning, trying to place when it was made. then elizabeth olsen shows up and is apparently playing a teenager but clearly looks mid-twenties to me, so i'm lost. then peter sarsgaard, but who the hell knows how old he is from role to role? he looks like 45 one minute and 25 the next. clark gregg pops up, but he looked like late 40s when he was 20, so no help there. jesus, demi moore is in this?? she looks fantastic, but i can't tell her age what with the plastic surgery and all. i start googling to try to figure this thing out, but the spanish title is clearly different than the english title. then richard dreyfuss has a cameo! okay, i'm putting an age to this. my god, what is this movie i've never heard of that has this cast? the whole time i'm watching this, it strikes me as a very intentionally indie-vibes version of a rom-com, the kind of bubblegum pop film that would be labeled "chick lit" if it was a book. but i have to confess that over 20ish minutes i wasn't turned off. the performances are really solid, if the material isn't especially good. fanning and olsen get wrapped up in a kind of love triangle with dreamy boyd holbrook, aka "oh, oh! it's the guy from that thing!", but i appreciated that the script stays pretty rooted in main protagonist lilly's (fanning) relationship with each of them separately. it's a bit more of a focus on a female perspective rather than having everything rotate around the guy. for his part, holbrook turns in a very solid performance for a female-invented unrealistic prince charming, managing to add a slight bit of under-the-surface depth to a relatively thankless role. the cast keeps impressing with solid but underutilized support from the always-amazing ellen barkin and kiernan shipka (of mad men fame). everything ostensibly revolves around these pretty girls deciding that they're too "good" and they want to get laid this summer before heading off to college. but a female superbad this is not. it turns out to be more about the impact of their families and co-workers and just sort of what it means to be testing out your empowerment as a young female. this and the performances are what really elevates this thing and keeps it a cut above typical indie rom-com fare. the directing style in the end feels fairly derivative and i was surprised to see the credits (i had missed the very beginning of the film) and find it was a first film from jake and maggie gyllenhaal's mom, at 67 years old! a longtime producer, i'm not sure what motivated her bring this particular script to screen, 20 years after she wrote it. it does seem like the work of someone showing all their influences, still without a style really to call their own. like a lesser sofia coppola maybe, or with a bit of duplass brothers thrown in. that said, the film was some rather lightweight fun but never outright stupid, as i find many of these "young girl gets selfish and makes mistakes" films to be. you could easily toss a coin and hit two dozen worse attempts to make a good film from a female perspective. it's a bit messy and a bit unoriginal, but the performances really make these into believable characters, and that's more than i can say for a lot of the precocious teens written by the likes of anderson, baumbach, gerwig, or cody. their films may be better made, but it's nice to have something that's not full of overwritten verbiage nobody would actually say and protagonists who are just outright selfish assholes because that's what the writers think all teenagers are. spoiler alert: it was just you. you were an asshole as a teen, and are kind of still an asshole. other teens are often quite nice and cool. shots fired. bw-bw-bwaaaaaaaan!
Jeff Light
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