Campus MovieFest 2014

Film Review
Very Good Girls (2013)
Rated R

Groundswell Productions

Very Good Girls is an uneven coming-of-age drama featuring Dakota Fanning and Elizabeth Olsen (Godzilla, Martha Marcy May Marlene). The ingredients are here—two skilled actors, a summer of sexual awakening, a lovers’ triangle, a sudden death—but the film never gels.

Best friends, college-bound Lily (Fanning) and earth-child Gerry (Olsen), make a pact to lose their virginity before summer’s end. Things get complicated when they fall for the same fellow, David (Boyd Holbrook, looking indistinguishable from actor Charlie Hunnam).

The film immediately engages with an impressive cast, then, strangely, begins to falter, scene by scene. The problem, I think, resides at the screenplay level.

Writer/director Naomi Foner Gyllenhall’s secondary characters are wasted in snapshot scenes. Gerry’s Bohemian parents—Richard Dreyfus and Demi Moore—are the expected hippy-attired, folk-music-playing cutouts. Lily’s folks—Clark Gregg and Ellen Barkin—are standard middle-class, middle-aged, boozy professionals. To be fair, Gregg has a couple of father-daughter scenes he attempts wrangle from cliche.

Every time a scene arrives—a death, an infidelity—it’s blunted by pacing or odd character responses. One exception is a gentle first-time love-making scene that is effective in its use of music, framing, acting and tone.

The film might have held together better, been more impactful, if balance had been brought to the main characters. This is Fanning’s show, and she can act. But Olsen, who can also act, is wasted. If equal measure had been brought to each girl, the conflict—both girls falling for the same artsy bad boy—might have moved us.

| Marvin Brown’s Movie Review Archive