All the Real Girls

Paul is a guy in his mid-'20s who lives in a broken down Southern mill town. He’s lived their all his life. All his friends have lived their all their lives. He works fixing cars at the garage his uncle owns and spends his nights drinking with his Tip, Bo, and Bust-Ass, his best friends from high school, and sleeping with whatever local girl he can talk into it. He still lives at home with his mother.

Paul’s not a relationship guy, and his life is headed nowhere . . . slowly. “You keep getting older,” Paul’s uncle tells him, reflecting on the disappointments of his own life,”and you don’t die.” Yet Paul is stricken with a vague sense that things could be different.

The vagaries of Paul's emotional life quickly coalesce into genuine emotions for Noel, Tip’s younger sister, a 19-year-old virgin just returned from an all-girls boarding school. Noel is smarter, deeper, and more complex than any of the other girls who have made themselves available to Paul, and in turn she begins to draw out Paul’s own submerged potential. They fall in love.

Of course, Tip doesn't approve of Paul—the until-now unrepentant ladies’ man—seeing his younger sister, and his mistrust of Paul’s intention toward Noel leads to a rift between the two lifelong friends. As the couple begins what is to be the first mature romantic relationship for each of them, they experience their first real break with small town stasis, an experience complete with all its thrills, complications, and consequences both good and bad.

There were plenty of places for Greer to go soap opera in this story. To his credit, Greer avoids such potential movie moments (his screenplay is less about plot than about feeling and loss) in favor of foregrounding the subtle human emotions of face and gesture against the decaying post-industrial hulk of the abandoned millworks and the washed-out mill town that’s hunkered down around it.

“All the Real Girls,” the second film from writer/director David Gordon Greer, was awarded a Special Jury Prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival (Greer’s first film, “George Washington” is equally stunning). “I wanted this film to be complicated like living and feeling,” Greer has said. Greer is gifted with the ability to imbue his dialogue with subtle, unaffected realism, and combines this gift with another—a directorial style that is visually arresting (Terrence Malick is clearly an influence) yet so unobtrusive and natural that at times it’s almost possible to forget you’re watching a film.

Matt Parks (May 6, 2003)