Today I watched The Good Girl. It was your standard tale of quiet desperation. A life of dirty kitchens with things left out on counters. Little miseries and retail lighting and insufficient fellows.
It was very sad. Not the boy, Holden. Were I to have read a synopsis this is the character I would have expected to like best. He’s a writer, struggling with inner demons alone. He wants to be understood. I found him repulsive. I found him empty, parasitic, leaking fluid and delusion.
The husband is just bland.
No, I liked her. Despite her ridiculous tan – how was this allowed – Jennifer Aniston handled this well. The sadness had little to do with her acting, though. The premise of the film is that her life is a prison due to decisions she had made earlier. She married the wrong man. She didn’t go to college. She stayed at a dead-end job.
I have a lot of gift cards. This is a popular present combining the flexibility of cash with the assurance that you were remembered. They sit on my desk and I observe them. I like thinking about the different things I might buy. I will go to, for example, Amazon, and examine interesting choices that I might make. A shirt. Some book. Titanium rings. I then close the browser and make a sandwich.
I cannot express how pleased I am that I never got married. I have done incontrovertible things but not that, never that.
“You ever feel like that? Like you gotta escape?” her husband asks.
But she doesn’t escape.
She throws herself on the mercy of the court as women so often do in stories like this. She remakes the same decisions and the lighting and music lead you to believe that things are better somehow, that she accepts this life. No more unfocused stares.
It just sort of starts over, but now there is a baby. If she were trapped before what is she now? The characters seek transfiguration through one another and basically accomplish nothing. Oh, one of them dies.
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