There is something painfully incompatible about youth and lasting love. Making a relationship work at a time when neither party has enough life experience to play fair is nearly impossible. Perhaps that’s why the scars left by the loss of that first true love mark so deeply. Young lovers carry so much idealism with them into early relationships that the inevitable fall back to reality is nothing less than catastrophic.
“All the Real Girls” is the antithesis of everything false in most modern love stories aimed at young audiences. Hollywood loves to churn out over-stuffed MTV commercials starring magazine cover models in some superficial approximation of young romance. “Real Girls” director David Gordon Green knows that true romance lies as much in nights spent alone pining for the one that got away as in summer evenings watching the sunset with someone in your arms. And he doesn’t have to use a pop soundtrack to make his point.
When 22-year-old Paul (Paul Schneider) falls in love with his best friend’s 18-year-old sister, Noel (Zooey Deschanel), he knows he’s found the girl to curb his womanizing ways. The two lie in bed connecting in a way neither has ever experienced, and there seems to be little doubt that this is the kind of love that lasts. But just as it tends to do in the real world, life somehow gets in the way.
Paul is not your run-of the-mill movie hero. Usually, movies about kids from small towns depict a protagonist looking to the horizon for something more out of life. Paul has never even considered the horizon. It takes Noel, an innocent virgin returning home from years at a boarding school, to make him question anything. Ironically, the only way she can do this is to inadvertently screw with his notion of … everything. It’s not Noel’s fault; her inexperience simply leads her to make irrational decisions. Paul is tormented as he struggles to make sense of her actions. But how can he do so when Noel can’t make sense of them herself?
Paul lives with his mother, Elvira (Patricia Clarkson). Some critics have said Green makes Elvira look pathetic because she dresses up like a clown to entertain kids at a local hospital. She’s not pathetic. She’s just had her ass kicked by life and lacks the energy to do anything for herself, choosing instead to bring a little happiness to others in dire need of hope. That’s not pathetic. That’s true, and even admirable.
“All the Real Girls” is also an exercise in atmosphere. Cinematographer Tim Orr revels in the vistas of North Carolina, and the music by Michael Linnen and David Wingo seems to drift in from the mountains like fog.
Green seems consumed by the notion of presenting sincere human interaction on screen. The characters of “Real Girls” don’t talk in witty, carefully written movie-speak. They talk like us. They stammer. They struggle to put their thoughts into words — which often can’t do justice to the feelings that tear through them. Green isn’t interested in easily identified themes or cliché plot points. He chucks the guise of script construction with the understanding that life experiences don’t unwind in easy three-act structures. And when a movie is imbued with as much humanity as “All the Real Girls,” an audience doesn’t need it to play out this way either. Green has an emotion in mind for each scene and simply sets his actors loose to realize it. The two leads, especially Deschanel, don’t act. They simply exist.
Eugene Weekly film critic Lois Wadsworth has criticized some of the characters of “Real Girls,” questioning why Noel’s brother Kip would feel the need to protect his sister’s virginity. But Kip’s anger is not about brotherly duty. It’s about his wariness of facing his own perceptions of women. He’s not uncomfortable with Paul and Noel’s relationship. He’s uncomfortable with himself.
Deschanel stole the show in movies like “Almost Famous” and “The Good Girl” in minor roles, but this is her first starring role. She has the charisma of a young Debra Winger, with perhaps a tad more sensitivity. If other directors can tune in to her talents as well as Green does, she has a great future ahead of her.
“All the Real Girls” is a revelation in itself. But it also officially marks the arrival of Green as one of the more intriguing young voices in movies. After his award-winning debut film “George Washington,” the 27-year-old filmmaker from North Carolina seems well on his way to something special. “All the Real Girls” is now playing at Bijou Art Cinemas.