Miller’s Girl (2024)

Miller's-Girl-(2024)
Miller’s Girl (2024)

While there is a lot of literature all around in and out of the movie, in this case no one has even heard of Nabokov. Any of these ‘intellectuals’ around would have known better than to allow themselves to slip into a cliché.

This is the first feature film by writer, director and producer Jade Halley Bartlett, and she does seem to have thematic underpinnings on the plots as star Jenna Ortega introduces the somewhat dreamlike and excessively narrating herself: “I do not want to put much variety in my narration as I am 18 and a very boring person, but my name is Cairo Sweet so that part is resonating.” Ortega provided this character: ‘I am very lonely, and literature is my comfort. I hate shallow people like my rich family.’ According to the parents’ description, they are always traveling as lawyers so Cairo stays within their family estate in Tennessee, solely amidst episodes of smoking and thrilling moments. The rest of the people who appear on the screen are just a hallucination, including her crafty best friend Winnie, who does look very gorgeous in her forest miniskirts and knobby socks, walking and scheming in circles all day long beautifully.

However, regardless of whether she is seeking attention or is being bored, she inexplicably decides to reach out to a rational man, who is somehow even less busy than she is, Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman) her creative writing teacher. We all know what this situation leads to: The teacher is YOUNG, and he teaches a very popular subject who EXCITES schoolgirls fantasia and will be exciting to the end, as every man knows.

However, the middle aged Miller’s age puts him in Dagmara Dominczyk’s father’s shoes. The man has lost his writing career and became a teacher but Beatrice, his wife, would not let him forget that, calling him out constantly. Dagmara Dominczyk makes quite an impression here quite cheekily as she flaunts her silk nighties with just the right amount of tipsiness.

However, that does not mean there is something soft in her speech as well as that of the beauty, and talent-packed Cairo. In the beginning, there is a tension between her and Jonathan that is magnetic, that which should not be there. They each feel that the other has the ability to connect with them on a deeper level – if they even begin to hope to be able to spend time together in the coffee shop after classes. However, the sharp and precise high school wit that made Heathers and Thoroughbreds so interesting in Miller’s Girl becomes tiresome. This is especially true when Jonathan assigns a midterm where Cairo needs to write a short story based on her favorite author and naturally chooses Henry Miller, just to irritate him.

The interplay between her composing the article and him going through it in the seclusion of his study, both of them taking turns in describing her erotic, young-adult literature, is thrilling from an editorial viewpoint but, in an unintentional way, comical from the point of view of the story.

Through it all, Ortega is magnetic enough to keep them watching even when her character’s actions and eventual motives appear to be cheap and so easy to foresee. In many ways this character who is girl-like yet wise beyond her age, who is deadpan yet wants to see the world in flames has a lot of Wednesday Addams in her. Freeman is in his khakis and cardigans a solid focus but gradually it is revealed that there is not much to that role. A long interminable scene where Cairo viciously dresses him down, and she is right. Many twists take place in Bartlett’s script including Cairo comparing Jonathan to “imitation crab in gas station sushi”. That’s the sort of thought that sticks with you.

Counterbalancing focus is what makes comprehension of ‘Miller’s Girl’ so difficult. There are some interesting moments scattered here or there within the muchness of it all, and unsatisfactorily little in terms of depth.

Other than the two leads, Bashir Salahuddin does magic as Jonathan’s supportive best friend and the school’s beguilingly warm athletic coach. Others enrich this otherwise vacuous exercise with some joys and surprises. Some say, this could have been good trash, as my mother used to say with Sidney Sheldon’s novels, but even that level is never reached.

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