The Good Girl

by Cindy Fuchs

Directed by Miguel Arteta

A Fox Searchlight release

Opens Friday at Ritz East

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³As a girl,” Justine (Jennifer Aniston) says as The Good Girl begins, “you see the world as a giant candy store filled with sweet candy and such.” Now 30, she stands daily at her register at the Retail Rodeo, and her life looks like a prison sentence. She doesn’t even picture escape anymore. Instead, she’s “good” -- responsible, quiet, resigned until she aches.

Other folks in Justine's small East Texas town find vague, generally ineffective ways "out." Her housepainter husband Phil (John C. Reilly) smokes pot with his best friend since high school, Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson). Her coworker Cheryl (Zooey Deschanel) dresses "punk" and rolls her eyes at the middle-aged ladies who shuffle through her checkout line; security guard Corny (Mike White, who wrote the script) finds solace in Bible study, joking with Justine about her imminent damnation when she won't attend.

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Into Justine's black hole of a routine walks Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal), glowering, self-consciously poetic, and self-named for Salinger's angry young hero. He and Justine are equally needy and inexperienced, in different ways. During lunch breaks, he regales her with the stories he's writing, all involving doomed teen romance and suicide. Justine can relate. "I was looking at you in the store and I liked how you kept to yourself," she tells him. "I saw in your eyes that you hate the world. I hate it too." Their evolution from friendship to sexual trysting at the local motel occurs awkwardly and earnestly, both grateful to be, as they put it, "gotten" (as in, "You get me"). But Justine soon realizes the relationship itself is doomed.

Much like Chuck & Buck, the previous collaboration between White and director Miguel Arteta, the film plumbs the depths of human longing and manipulation, with similar legerdemain. The Good Girl reveals Justine's frustrations and non-options without condescending to her or treating her limited understanding as a lack of intelligence. And it resists easy resolution. Superficially, the finale looks conventionally "happy." But here, the family unit is uncertain and the smiles aren't so comforting as you might wish they were. Justine has been gotten, and she's still trying to be good.