Overrated Independent Films V: "All the Real Girls" (2000)

The awkward opening quarter hour of David Gordon Green's second feature, following the amazingly overpraised "George Washington" (2000), "All the Real Girls" (2003) is, like it, filmed in North Carolina, but even more off the beaten track, in Marshall, a town in western North Carolina that had a population of 842 in the 2000 census.

The sole industry in town is a cotton mill. The movie's protagonist Paul (Paul Schneider, a Winston-Salem film school buddy of Green's does not work in it, or anywhere else, except for occasionally helping out his divorced mother (Patricia Clarkson), who works as a clown for children's birthday parties and a facility for retarded children.

The female lead, Noel (Zooey Deschanel), who has been away at a boarding school and has returned and taken a job in the mill, is, apparently, the only young female in town that Paul has not banged. (In a town of 842, 26 conquests counts as a lot, though this seems very quaint to an urban gay man...)

He wants to treat Noel proper, breaking from the 4-F philosophy that he has followed heretofore. Among other things, she is the sister of his best friend Tip (Shea Whigham), who has been along on some of Noel's sexcapades and warns his virgin sister (who retorts: "If he's so terrible, why is he your best friend?", a question to which he has no answer).

Paul goes slow with Noel, who tells him she trusts him and is eager to giver her virginity to him.

I was so bored by the early goings that I nearly stopped the DVD. Instead I began searching for my jury summons and left it on. By the time I found it (fallen from the end of the table at which it wasn't supposed be saved), I had become more interested in the awkward (very awkward) romance.

There are some beautiful shots of decay (by talented cinematographer Tim Orr) and some impressive speeches delivered by Whigham and Clarkson. (Deschanel has one too, but I thought it ridiculous.) I should have hated the inability of either Noel or Paul to articulate what they felt in a big playground confrontation and a later non-confrontation on the street outside her house. Oddly, I didn't.

Even more oddly, I enjoyed the anticlimax of Paul trying to get his dog into the French Broad River and the final upside-down reflection in the river of the town, a bridge, and autumn leaves. The scene nearly screams "elegiac visual poetry" (especially the orange leaves), but I accepted it.

Deschanel and Schneider were attractive and youngish (though not as young as their characters were supposed to be). They did not stimulate identification or much sympathy from me through most of the movie. (Clarkson, perhaps the queen of indie film in this decade, did.)

The low-key New Agey soundtrack by Michael Linnen and David Wingo worked for me. (They had also supplied music for "George Washington.")

The pace, especially early on, is close to inert, but I have to admit that over the slow course of the movie, I developed some interest and some sympathy for Paul and Noel, and, most surprisingly, Tip. Green and the actors also provided some interesting remarks about the conception and shooting of the movie in the 19-minute making-of featurette, "Improv and Ensemble: The Evolution of a Film". (I did not play the commentary track with Green and Schneider or watch the deleted scenes, but did watch the trailers for "All the Young Girls" and "Love Liza.")

I am far less impressed by Green as a director than many critics (here and elsewhere), but don't think him entirely a fraud inflicted by critics. "Pineapple Express" (2008) again showed that he gives actors a lot of freedom, perhaps it's better because he had better actors (James Franco)?