No matter how many times the argument comes up, we don’t really have a shortage of movie stars – especially when it comes to fandom. There are still plenty of actors with devotees who eagerly follow their favorites from project to project. Jenna Ortega has built that kind of following, from her child actor phase as a badass Disney TV star to playing young Jane on Jane the Virginthe title role in Netflix’s Wednesday, and one of the new knife fodder-to-be in the Scream reboot series. Her fans raved about the excitement of seeing her play more mature, independent and ambitious roles. But they’ll have an interesting time figuring out how to swallow her new movie. Miller’s girl.
Anyone who felt distanced from their peers in high school and was ready to move on to the adult world should find their first spark of recognition in Jade Halley Bartlett’s writing and directing debut. Miller’s girl Ortega plays the impossibly named Cairo Sweet, a wealthy high school student who lives a decadent life in a large house while her parents travel. Cairo seems endlessly bored with everything but her own excessive, exaggerated writing. She briefly finds a kindred spirit in one of her teachers, Jonathan Miller, played by Marvel Cinematic Universe/Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films/Cornetto trilogy veteran Martin Freeman. Given how jaded they both are with everything else, and how quickly they fascinate each other, it’s no surprise that this teacher-student relationship goes wrong quickly.
What is surprising, however, is how Miller’s girl just as quickly loses the plot, losing everyone in Cairo in the attempt to focus the story on her.
There has been a lot of talk about it lately whether films become longer on average, and whether that’s a problem for anyone but theater owners who want to get through shows faster, and the usual Internet kvetchers. But while the tight 90-minute thriller (in this case 93) still has great appeal, Miller’s girl is a strong argument for longer films. In this case, it could have really used the extra runtime to develop its characters.
Miller’s girl is a small story with only a few main characters, but most of them are broad, cartoonish types reminiscent of the first season of cheerfulness. Cairo’s best friend, Winnie (Gideon Adlon), is a flirty virgin who is a non-stop fountain of come-ons and sex talk, until she suddenly shifts into a completely different mode halfway through the film. Her sharp left turn is far more justified than that of Jon’s wife Beatrice (Dagmara Dominczyk): She starts out as an amiable workaholic who’s three-quarters of the way through her marriage, then abruptly becomes a lurching alcoholic who lashes out at her husband. are straight out Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Photo: Zac Popik/Lionsgate
But the film’s biggest problem is Jon and Cairo’s relationship, which evolves so abruptly from a dangerous but moving series of early connections to the third-act meltdown that it feels like the second act is missed entirely. It’s hard to say exactly how Bartlett sees their relationship: depending on the scene and whose point of view it’s coming from, Jon comes across as either an understandably lonely man who merely admires his student’s writing, or an asshole whose every decision is under his control. takes a drug. Cairo, for its part, shuttles back and forth between the two countries Wild thingsLow-level schemer and an awkward, isolated teenager who hasn’t yet come to terms with the fact that she can’t claim her teacher as a soulmate – at least, not if he has even an ounce of moral strength or sense of propriety in his body.
Miller’s girl is a lush, even overripe film, full of stilted voiceovers from Cairo’s writing, alongside snippets of other characters’ equally vibrant work. (An excerpt from one of her stories: ‘Survival and desire merged, turning an aphotic gaze inward. I saw my expectations dismantled and torn apart by the hard and starving dogs of reality, truths that sit in the void of space like a hyper-gigantic star, burning to ashes any elements too weak to withstand the awesome heat.) Cairo takes the oft-banned author Henry Miller as writing inspiration, as she reads her copy of Under the roofs of Paris as she navigates high school. Her admiration for his work is evident in her wordiness, her calculated boredom, and her determination to push the boundaries of censorship by turning her writing assignments into sexual fantasies.
The visuals and production design are often dark and saturated with rich, heavy colors, and Bartlett weaves in and out of fantasy elements to illustrate her points. It’s compelling visual storytelling, but whether the narrative elements work for a particular viewer will depend heavily on whether they find writing like the above evocative, or simply pretentious and unbearable.
Image: Lionsgate
What Miller’s girl does best – and what gives Ortega the opportunity to absolutely own this film – is capture the specific era of adolescence where girls can easily shift back and forth between adulthood and childhood without warning. Ortega gets a chance here to play a downright predatory vamp and a giggling, shy schoolgirl, without the sense that either is a front or a mockery for Cairo. Her adult personality isn’t fully formed yet, and while she tries out faces, just as she tries out words like “cuss words” in her writing, they’re all still part of her – and they’re all part of why Mr. Miller should know better than to treat her as anything but a student.
However, the other characters, including Jon, switch between personalities in the same way. And they just seem inconsistent, tied to what the story needs in a given scene. The final act is rushed and forced, without the space necessary to give any of these characters the credit they deserve, or give the audience any idea of how to play the leads and their relationship. May December Most recently, it navigated similar ground in navigating the later consequences of a sexual relationship between a teacher and her young student, but it explored the same ambiguities with nuance and meaningful thought. Miller’s girl just skims the surface and settles for making that surface look visually lush.
None of that matters to Ortega’s fans, who get to see enough range from her here to make the excursion worthwhile. Miller’s girl is a sumptuous meal for her, a chance to play different facets of the same girl while finding the connections between them. For everyone else, though, they’re short rations and more than a little underbaked.
Miller’s girl is in theaters now.