Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jade Halley Bartlett
Starring: Jenna Ortega, Martin Freeman, Dagmara Domińczyk, Bashir Salahuddin, Gideon Adlon
Literary Review's infamous bad Sex in Fiction Award might want to
extend its reach to take in movies. There's no onscreen sex in
writer/director Jade Halley Bartlett's entertainingly awful
Miller's Girl, but there sure is a lot of bad sex written within the film and
relayed to the audience through a voiceover that tries to convince us
we're listening to the words of a literary ingénue.
"Heartbreak is a slow motion car crash set to Mozart," is but one of
the movie's voiceover clangers as uttered by its young anti-heroine,
Jenna Ortega's Cairo Sweet. It's an apt description for the film
itself, which really is the sort of car crash that actively encourages
the viewer to slow down and take in its awfulness. It's the best sort of
bad movie, one that has unshakeable confidence in itself.
The drama takes place over a hot Tennessee early summer. This allows
for an evocation of America's Southern Gothic tradition, but perhaps
more importantly it provides an excuse for its female cast to wear very
revealing outfits (so much for the male gaze). Cairo is an emo teen's
fever dream of an ideal protagonist. She lives alone in a crumbling
gothic mansion filled with rotary phones, musty books and birds in
cages, in case you didn't get the metaphor, and she dresses like the
mistress of an 18th century highwayman.
On the advice of her always horny and hungry best friend Winnie (Gideon Adlon), Cairo switches to a creative writing class taught by Jonathan Miller
(not that one). Played by Martin Freeman with an unconvincing
American accent, Jonathan is the classic cliché of the failed writer who
teaches because he can't write. Disillusioned by a constant parade of
disinterested pupils, Jonathan is invigorated by Cairo's passion for
writing. He's impressed that she reads Henry Miller, and he's flattered
to discover she has read the one book he managed to get published
himself, passages of which she's even memorised.
Determined to nourish Cairo's talent, Jonathan gives her a special
assignment: to write a short story in the style of her favourite author.
She chooses Henry Miller.
No tutor with any integrity would encourage a student to write a piece
of fan fiction, but Miller's Girl is essentially a work of
fan fiction in its own right. Not of any one particular author, but to
the entire American Southern tradition of sweaty melodrama. Cairo is one
of those classic young heroines who lives on the outskirts of town and
finds comfort in the sort of things that make others uncomfortable. When
asked if she doesn't get scared walking through the woods to school on
her own, she replies "I'm the scariest thing in there." Jonathan's wife,
Beatrice (Dagmara Dominczyk), is as clichéd a Southern Gothic
stereotype as you could imagine, constantly drunk and permanently clad
in a negligee. Campy and vampy, Dominczyk's performance channels Liz
Taylor as Beatrice constantly berates, mocks and emasculates Jonathan.
"I married a writer, and now I'm married to a teacher," she cruelly
scolds.
No wonder then that Jonathan falls for the first female figure that
doesn't view him as mediocre. Spending more time outside school with
Cairo, Jonathan comes close to crossing professional and ethical lines.
When Cairo hands in her essay, a smutty story about a teacher named Mr.
Murphy seducing his favourite student, it all threatens to go a bit
Poison Ivy.
The subsequent attempt to turn Miller's Girl into the
sort of erotic thriller Michael Douglas might once have headlined is
derailed by the confusing filmmaking. Bartlett's style is so over the
top that it's difficult to tell if what we're seeing is real or a
fantasy of the protagonists' imagining. When Jonathan visits Cairo's
home to return her misplaced cellphone, we see them kiss on a rainy
porch, but it's so laughably stylised that we can't tell if it's to be
taken at face value. Cairo certainly claims it occurred when she
vindictively reports Jonathan to his vice principal. Jonathan denies
Cairo's story. We don’t know who to believe because we're unsure if the
kiss we saw actually happened. This makes for a redundant final act as
we're unable to side with either character. Has a young girl been taken
advantage of by a middle-aged man, or has the latter been manipulated
and framed by the former? Who knows?
A major issue with Miller's Girl is that it can't decide
on its primary audience. Everything involving Cairo and Winnie seems
aimed at the Young Adult market, while everything with Jonathan and his
wife plays like it was made for a middle-aged viewer. The tone is
similarly all over the place. While Cairo, Jonathan and Beatrice are
written and performed as the players of an erotic thriller, Winnie and
Jonathan's fellow teacher and confidant Boris (Bashir Salahuddin)
seem to have wandered in from a raucous comedy. Boris's unsubtle
encouragement of Winnie's crush bears no relation to the reality of
teacher-pupil relations in 2024, and is closer to a subplot from a 1980s
sex comedy about horny camp counsellors. With her catchphrase of "It's time for chicky and biccies,"
you could imagine Winnie being played by Brittany Murphy 25 years
earlier.
Miller's Girl is a mess, but you simply can't look away.
If it had been made in a past decade you might ask what people were
smoking at the time, but such campy delights are all too rare today and
should be savoured when they find their way onto our screens. I grade
this one H for Hilarious.
Miller's Girl is on UK/ROI VOD
from February 19th.
