All the Real Girls Reviews

GEORGE WASHINGTON (2000), David Gordon Green's mannered debut, was just the kind of laconic dream of a film that had adoring critics grasping for names like William Faulkner and Terrence Malick to evoke its unique style. Set in the same rusting hill country of North Carolina, Green's follow-up is equally affected but far less affecting. After spending most of her adolescence at an all-girl boarding school, 18-year-old Noel (Zooey Deschanel) returns to the small mill town where she was born, and where her overly protective older brother Tip (Shea Whigham) still lives with their parents. Tip, a self-styled tough guy with a mouthful of braces, a moody drawl and mile-high pompadour that would do James Dean proud, warns his best friend Paul (Paul Schneider) to back off; Noel hasn't had much experience with sex and Paul, who's seduced and abandoned every eligible girl in town, has had way too much. Paul, who also still lives at home — his single mother, Elvira (Patricia Clarkson), works children's parties and hospital wards as a clown — swears that he's different now, and that Noel, with whom he's fallen hopelessly in love, will help him change is wicked, wicked ways. But that's a heavy burden for a young, directionless woman to bear — Noel's not even sure whether she's going to college next year, or staying put and getting a job at the town mill — and only winds up breaking Paul's all-too vulnerable heart. With considerable help from GEORGE WASHINGTON cinematographer Tim Orr, Green once again succeeds in beautifully visualizing a world that's entirely his own — perpetually autumnal, romantically decayed and altogether unreal — through which his characters simply float, rather than inhabit in any real, organic way. Green and Schneider developed the script while both were still students at the North Carolina School of the Arts, but it still feels unfinished; much of the dialogue sounds improvised and irritatingly kooky ("I had a dream you grew a garden on a trampoline, and I was so happy because I invented peanut butter"), and too many scenes feel like actor's exercises in which characters assume unconventional positions and suffer bouts of spontaneous dancing. The always charming Deschanel manages to rise above most of the film's logy pretensions, but the usually excellent Clarkson isn't so lucky. The film's low point comes when Elvira, in full clown makeup, weeps like Pagliacci and admits that, yes, she's crying inside.