The Good Girl
True Romance
We are fortunate to live in a country with so many different romantic ideas; the one in The Good Girl is pretty typical. Just go. Drop everything. Take off with the one you love and leave your life behind. Hit the road, drive from town to town, until you can make a new start somewhere where nobody knows you, where you’re a stranger, where the past is something that’s disappeared with the 8-track player and the Memorial Day doubleheader.
But like so many romantic ideas, the idea of romantic escape is pretty impractical. I mean, first of all you have to pack, and if you leave quickly, you’re going to make a mess. And you have to leave your job behind; even if you hate it, it still pays the bills. And what if leaving — no matter how depressing your circumstances are now — is an even bigger mistake than staying? Taking off, leaving, escaping sounds so romantic, but if you really thought about it, weighed the consequences, would you do it? Could you do it?
This is Jennifer Aniston’s dilemma, and it takes her more or less the entire movie to figure it out. She is in a tough spot. She’s just turned thirty, she wants a child, but hasn’t been successful in conceiving with her husband (John C. Reilly). And he’s a piece of work, too. He’s a housepainter, and a slob, and a pothead. Worse, he’s joined at the hip to Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson), his housepainting partner, and a man too dumb to display the Texas flag properly.
Things don’t get any better at work, where she is trapped behind the cosmetics counter of Retail Rodeo, doing makeovers for the fashion victims of the greater Southwest. Her co-workers range from the overtly religious to the nosy to the tragically hip. (The latter is played to the hilt by Zooey Deschnanel from Almost Famous, who is largely, but not quite, wasted as the comic relief.) Aniston is bored and blue, dreaming of escape, but loaded down with care.
It’s not too much longer before Jake Gyllenhaal finds her. Gyllenhaal (Moonlight Mile) is Holden Caufield-lite, a weedy young cashier at the Retail Rodeo, with pretensions of being a novelist, and a charming way with words. Aniston doesn’t know him ten minutes before she’s venting; her husband is a pig, and she’s depressed and unhappy about it. True romances have started with less.
They fall for each other right away — and along the way, it’s important to note, they run a veritable little clinic on how not to handle a sleazy affair in a small Texas town. But in the midst of sneaking around, and furtive groping in the Retail Rodeo storeroom, and long lunches together, something horrible happens. Aniston’s character develops a conscience.
Conscience, as it turns out, is inimical to the entire spirit of romantic escape. Escaping involves forgetting your own life, but conscience remembers, conscience won’t let you forget, conscience keeps pulling you back in no matter how badly you want to get out. Jennifer Aniston’s (quite extraordinary, really) acting performance derives from understanding how her character’s conscience is twisting her around like a pretzel, piling lie on top of lie, betrayal on top of betrayal.
The Good Girl, unfortunately, never got the credit it deserved; the “Cast of Friends Kiss of Death” principle doomed it from the beginning. But the movie is thoughtful, and honest, and sympathetic to Aniston’s plight and her desires. And if, at the end, she is rewarded unduly for her choices, one can’t help but still wish the best for her.