Released 2002
Stars Jennifer Aniston, Jake Gyllenhaal, John C. Reilly, Tim Blake Nelson, Zooey Deschanel
Directed by Miguel Arteta

The Good Girl reminded me of a serious version of Raising Arizona with some of its speech patterns, but it's an entirely different movie. It's billed as a comedy, but it's really a drama about a young woman drowning in the dreary desperation of her routine life. The woman, Justine (Jennifer Aniston), is 30 and works at the Retail Rodeo, which is a small, dumpy retail store with too many employees and too few customers. She's bored by her job and her pot-smoking husband (John C. Reilly), but saying she's bored isn't enough. She's desperately bored--desperate to find an out, or for something to happen. This desperation leads her down a path that she normally wouldn't take, and she hooks up with a young co-worker, who's named himself Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal) after the main character in "The Catcher in the Rye." She sees in him everything she doesn't see in her husband: intelligence, excitement, danger, energy, but also instability and a desperation that's greater than her own. I liked this movie. It didn't blow me away, but it's a good film. I enjoyed the ending, which was powerful in its understated manner, and it subtly showed Justine had more in common with her husband than she thought. After all, we all need a way to escape our mundane lives.

Summary by Bill Alward, January 25, 2003