All the Real Girls
USA 2002
Reviewed by Xan Brooks
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
A depressed mill town in North Carolina, the present. Paul, 22, (Paul Schneider) lives with his mother and works for his uncle (Ben Mouton). His free time is spent either hanging out with his childhood friends Tip (Shea Whigham), Bo (Maurice Compte) and Bust-Ass (Danny McBride) or chasing women. Tip's virginal 18-year-old sister Noel (Zooey Deschanel) returns from boarding school for the summer. She and Paul begin a relationship, which enrages Tip, who knows his friend's reputation. Paul and Noel spend the night at a motel, confess their love for each other but do not have sex. Paul is reconciled with Tip, who announces he is to become a father.
Noel returns from a weekend party and tells Paul that she slept with a boy she met there. Furious, Paul breaks up with Noel and later sees her being escorted around town by Bust-Ass. Later, Paul and Noel have sex, but are still not entirely reconciled. With the relationship in the balance, Paul prepares to face a future that may or may not include Noel.
Review
The films of David Gordon Green combine poetic rapture with gauche self-consciousness. For every critic bewitched by the woozy splendour of his 2000 debut George Washington, there was another (myself included) who found its art-house contrivances and air of languid earnestness a shade suspect. Those same elements are rife throughout Green's sophomore feature. Second time around they come across as infinitely less objectionable. On the contrary, All the Real Girls' swooning self-obsession is utterly in keeping with the antics of its star-crossed lovers. From first kiss to fumbled reconciliation, the film is a gorgeous marriage of form and content.
Scripted by Green and lead actor Paul Schneider, All the Real Girls positively reels under the influence of its subject matter. It shows us first love in all its glimmered guises: as a miracle, a madness, a cleansing agent, a fundamental self-absorption. Each scene turns a different side to the light. When Paul (Schneider) first begins his relationship with Noel (Zooey Deschanel), their feelings are so strong that the rest of the world (as represented by the depressed small-town backdrop) is rendered instantly inconsequential. Later, dirty life begins to intrude upon the idyll. Both parties, we realise, are attempting to twist the romance to fit their specific needs. Paul sees it as his redemption, a chance to make amends for past behaviour and begin anew with a trusting, unsullied teenager. Noel's flaw is harder to define. On returning from a weekend away, she announces that she has lost her virginity to a boy she barely knew. Were her actions a rebellion against Paul's idealised view of her, or a nave way of testing her love for him? Noel seems as bewildered as anyone.
It is at this point that All the Real Girls breaks from the script of a thousand other young love stories and enters a land of beautiful disarray. Furious, Paul tries to steer clear of Noel but can't. Desperately, they attempt a reconciliation only to discover that sleeping together is not the same as being together. They love each other but suspect that life is rushing them in opposite directions. And all the while, you have the sense that the film is luxuriating in their anguish, picking off the scabs to watch them bleed again.
Inevitably Green's fixed focus places huge demands on its star pairing. Of the two, Schneider comes off worst. Paul is a solid, sympathetic presence, but there's something missing from the backstory. We are forced to make a major leap of the imagination in order to reconcile his current, reformed state with the love 'em and leave 'em rogue he was before.
Deschanel, by contrast, is a revelation. It's not just the limpid eyes and froggy voice that remind one of the young Debra Winger. She has the same range and richness of talent. Her Noel is by turns vital and vulnerable, straightforward and coy. Previously, Deschanel has had to make do with vibrant support slots in the likes of Almost Famous and The Good Girl. All the Real Girls anoints her as one of the brightest talents of her generation.
There is a wealth of other good things in Green's picture: Tim Orr's misty cinematography, earthy support playing from Ben Mouton and Patricia Clarkson, the lilting bluegrass score. But these are complementary ingredients, pretty bunting around the main subject.
Except that the longer All the Real Girls progresses, the more you wonder if Noel and Paul might be complementary themselves. Increasingly Green shows his lovers to be delicate vessels, helpless puppets of something more powerful than themselves. All too often, romantic dramas fall back on a set of banal emotional props to capture the rush and flush of first love. All the Real Girls gets closer to the essence. Admittedly, this essence comes with its own in-built banality, as reflected in the intimate banter of two people who foolishly believe that nobody has ever felt this way before, ever. But there is a wildness here too, a capricious power that tosses its lovers from rapture to ruin to a kind of unhappy wisdom. "Sometimes I pretend that I only have ten seconds left to live," murmurs Noel at one stage. By the end both parties have lived through their mayfly existence and staggered out the other side, as much cursed as blessed by their experience. Everything else is merely aftermath.
Credits
- Director
- David Gordon Green
- Producers
- Lisa Muskat
- Jean Doumanian
- Screenplay
- David Gordon Green
- Story
- David Gordon Green
- Paul Schneider
- Director of Photography
- Tim Orr
- Editors
- Zene Baker
- Steven Gonzales
- Production Designer
- Richard Wright
- Music/Original Score Performed/Recorded by
- David Wingo
- Michael Linnen