The Good Girl

On the surface it’s a it’s an strange idea for a film: Jennifer Aniston, one of the stars of the mega popular American sitcom “Friends,” starring in an comedy-drama inspired by Flaubert’s great novel ‘Madame Bovary,’ transposing the story from 19th Century France to a small town in Texas, USA, 21st century. Somehow, though, director Miguel Arteta and writer Mike White (who had previously collaborated on Chuck and Buck) make it all work.

Aniston stars as Justine, a 30-something woman who is tired of her life her small town life, her dead-end job at the Retail Rodeo, and her childless marriage to Phil (John C. Reilly), her house painter/marijuana-smoking couch potato husband. Desperate to escape the crushing boredom of her life, Justine begins an affair with a sympathetic co-worker Tom (Jake Gyllenhaal), a morose college dropout with a drinking problem and an unhealthy fascination with ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ (he prefers to be called Holden, calling Tom his “slave name”), who still lives at home with his parents.

The affair, mostly a series of encounters in whatever space is available to them (a car, his bedroom at his parents’ house, the stockroom at Retail Rodeo, a cheap motel room), briefly provides Justine a respite from the drudgery of her daily life. Soon, though, this affair too becomes, to use a phrase Tom uses earlier in the movie “a victim of the world’s hypocrisy.”

This movie transcends a fairly routine story, primarily due to the strengths of its performances. You may be surprised to see how good a performance Aniston is capable of (unlike the rest of the “Friends” cast). The recently omnipresent Reilly gives another outstanding if low-key performance as Phil. Gyllenhaal (‘Donnie Darko,’ ‘Lovely and Amazing,’ ‘Moonlight Mile’) shows himself once again to be a terrific young actor (ok, he was in ‘Bubble Boy’ too, all movies can’t be great ones).

‘The Good Girl’ is a story about boredom, the lengths to which we are willing to go to overcome it, and the consequences we face for going to those lengths. A small movie blessed with a big movie cast to go along with a talented, ambitious writer/director team, it manages to be an effective, emotional drama, a piercing social satire, and a subtly illuminating morality play without trampling its characters underfoot.

Matt Parks