The Good Girl

Jennifer Aniston gets some kind of prize, perhaps a case of Turtle Wax, for being the first cast member of Friends to successfully anchor a drama on the big screen. Maybe it helps that Good Girl seems like a mild comedy on the surface. But there’s a shark under the waters. Director Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Mike White previously collaborated on the stalker-buddy movie Chuck & Buck, carving out a niche in stories about suffocating relationships among the socially damaged. Here again they take sadistic glee in placing their poor, normal protagonist adrift among a sea of losers and crazies. Aniston plays Justine, a well-meaning young woman trapped in a stifling marriage to Phil (John C. Reilly) and a stifling job at the soul-sucking Retail Rodeo. Enter Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal), a brooding college dropout with literary pretensions who seems to offer a chance of escape. They begin a secret affair, she playing Emma Bovary to his, well, Holden Caulfield. Of course, this isn’t the sort of film that goes for the happy ending. The writing is often cruel, but The Good Girl is redeemed by the emotional depth of its cast. We’ve come to expect good work from people like Reilly, Gyllenhaal, and Tim Blake Nelson, but Aniston is surprising and sympathetic in a role that takes her far beyond the boundaries of Rachel Green.