Dirty Girl

Dirty Girl (2010)

The movie starts with such stupidity and what seems like terrible acting and movie-making you're going to want to quit. Unless you're a high school kid looking for cheap thrills (and there ain't anything wrong with that--it's just a style thing). But hang in there. This movie gets better and better and better. By the end all the hilarity crashes down to a weepy finale--more convincing than it has any right to be after all the zany stuff prior.

It's mostly about two high school kids who don't fit in. They seem like opposites and we all know how fun opposite are in movie comedies. One is slutty girl Danielle who has a dysfunctional home life and who is wild partly because she's bored by school and is (it turns out) smarter than the cliché would have it. The other is an overweight kid Clarke who knows he's gay and who is afraid of coming out but everyone knows already anyway. He also has a dysfunctional family, and the movie eventually also clashes the two sets of parents (and accessory kin).

The plot moves fast and turns into a crisis and then a road trip. All good stuff. And it's filmed with an openminded low-budget freedom that makes it fun and doesn't always worry about verisimilitude. (The two leads are in a family planning class, for example, and are given a bag of flour they have to treat as their new baby. The bag has a face drawn on it in magic marker, and the face changes depending on what's going on around it. Her--it's a girl.)

But mostly it's the acting of Danielle (Juno Temple), and Clarke (Jeremy Dozier), that makes it all stick. Temple in particular is just oozing and exploding with energy and dramatic screen presence, whether being saucy or sassy, fun or sad. She takes over every scene and you want her to. Danielle drives a red 1965 Mustang convertible (of course--what else?). She knows what matters and who's a jerk and doesn't put up with crap. She's troubled, but all along you know she's basically right, and you end up totally on her side. And on Clarke's side, too, as he tries to make sense of his world now that someone accepts him without even blinking.

Eventually there is a deliberate Hollywood ending, complete with tears and spotlights on the stars. It's a farce, I suppose, or a silly over the top romp, and there are going to be people who never let it click. Humor is fickle. But once I was a good half hour in (and it took that long, unfortunately), but once I was, there was no going back. It's worth sticking it out. Very worth it.

"Nobody likes a dirty girl," Principal Mulray (Grubbs) tells Danielle (Temple) early on. She is a promiscuous adolescent, full of life, spunk, attitude, and guts. But she comes from a background that isn't so full of life and gutsy. Her mother (Jovovich) was a tramp in high school and because of that Danielle has never heard of or met her real father. After discovering her father's real identity, she packs up and hits the road going across Oklahoma to find him. She also does it to avoid her mother's new Mormon fiancée (Macy) and his outlandish punishment of virtually abandoning one of their own to show how important family is. My guess anyone would abandon him at first chance.

Danielle takes the car of her chubby, homosexual friend from Sex Ed. class Clarke (played fantastically by Jeremy Dozier). Clarke's father (Yoakam) has been verbally and physically abusive to his son for many years and is only further outraged to find out of his sexual orientation. Thankfully, the film, mostly, doesn't play Clarke's sexuality for laughs. We have a strong sense that he can't help his feelings, and is dealing with them in the only way he knows how to. Guys and girls alike proclaim their love for the opposite sex, why can't Clarke? Danielle and Clarke also take a sack of flour (their "baby" from Sex Ed. class) along on the ride and boy does the kid get the journey of her life.

Dirty Girl is an exciting, sort of refreshing gem that mimics not only the eighties style of rebellion, but bathes in a surprisingly dramatic bath of coming of age storytelling. Going into this expecting a solid comedy with laughs and humor galore, I was stunned to see how heavy the dramatic elements are. In many ways, this is a very sad view on one's adolescence and sometimes the laughs we get are because of insecurity and stem from the fact that their true feelings are hidden.

There's also a nice blend of wit and soul in the writing. In some ways this could be an account of writer/director Abe Sylvia's life. He grew up homosexual in Oklahoma and had been working on this story since around 2004. The film's bawdy nature is fast paced and entertaining, but Dirty Girl seems to stem from a world a lot more sentimental in emotions than we could've thought.

For an independent film, it certainly packs in some credible names. Milla Jovovich is a nice addition to the cast, Temple is very convincing, Dozier is the star of the entire film, Macy is about ten miles away from his character of Frank Gallagher in Shameless, and Tim McGraw and Dwight Yoakam are delightfully unexpected.

In many ways Dirty Girl is funny, charming, delightful, and satisfying. In many ways it's dark, sad, depressing, and begging to be loved. We have two insecure characters that go about their insecurity in totally different ways. One, giving herself up to anyone and everyone, and the other just sitting by idly in high school taking the hatred from his peers and probably his classmates. It's a sad world after all.

Starring: Juno Temple, Jeremy Dozier, Milla Jovovich, William H. Macy, and Dwight Yoakam. Directed by: Abe Sylvia.

I saw Dirty Girl at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2010 and it was amazing!!!

I thought it had a good blend of drama and comedy therefore when things got heavy or sad I didn't get depressed or too down because a few scenes later I would be laughing.

I thought it was the best portrayal of the beauty of a relationship between a gay man and a straight woman since Will & Grace. It also had a great soundtrack. I can't wait to have a movie night at my house with this movie. It was just a fun movie with depth. No academy award worthy performances in my opinion but the acting is definitely good but no mind blowing performances.

My fav film of TIFF 2010

This movie was rated 37% on Metacritic and 27% on Rotten tomatoes and honestly I think this is wrong, wrong, wrong. I expect this is because the title is misleading...the movie is not about a "dirty girl" at all, it's about a journey of discovery and maturation and the transformative power of friendship. The writing is not particularly sophisticated so in lesser hands the movie could easily have sucked. However the two lead actors were so engaging (and the supporting cast were also excellent) that what could have felt like a flat, unconvincing story was, in my opinion, extremely touching. I confess toward the end I was crying in sympathy for the loss experienced by the main characters. Thankfully, the final scenes in the movie turned this into a positive (and even mildly cathartic) experience. I had become invested in the characters (so you see, I cannot possibly trash this movie the way so many others have).

I liked "Dirty Girl" because it was unabashedly fun. It was pro-gay rights, pro-female independence, and anti-religious persecution without it being about any of that. On the surface it was an '80s throwback with the teen kids embracing the "anything goes" attitude while their parents clung to their conservative values. Pack a suitcase, pop in a mixed tape and run away.

Juno Temple stars as the titular dirty girl, Danielle. She assumed the role of the rebellious daughter and the inappropriate student who relished any opportunity to be the sex symbol. The whole-heartedness with which Temple became Danielle not only made this type of person acceptable but empathetic too.

This isn't to say that the film was perfect. One of the big drawbacks was that although the lead character did evolve, she did so with incongruent leaps. My other issue was that whenever Danielle and her companion Clarke had to stop and sing, the film stopped too. That could be on purpose though since they do seem to be trying to sell the soundtrack just as much as the movie itself.

It's the movie itself, though, that I liked. It was the passion that all of the characters had for life that just danced off the screen. The societal lessons that important movies try to teach and which we all probably already know, are just silly, feel-good bonuses here since they came up with new, more realistic, and more relatable endings. Wait for Clarke's reaction to his final circumstances if at any point you fear the monotonous drone of melodrama.

"Dirty Girl" does bring to mind similar better movies which walked parallel paths, most notably "Jolene". And although after watching this, I immediately came home and bought the latter, it should still be able to find its place among accepting fans. It moves along at a quick pace, keeping the lead characters delightful even when they're depressed, and keeping the tone light even when the supporting characters commit some pretty heinous acts. I've never had a problem enjoying those types of conflicting scenes, but it does account for the movie's poor reception.

Keep in mind that this is writer and director Abe Sylvia's first film and that the archetypal characters can actually belong to any decade then you should have no problem enjoying, and secretly wanting to be, the dirty girl.