A friend and I watched David Gordon Green’s All The Real Girls the other night. I’ve long been curious about this director after reading some of the reviews of his films on Cosmoetica. If you read them over, the reviews of the first two films describe someone with the potential for greatness, but then the third details a kind of regression as he has began making more conventional Hollywood films. To be fair, though, I’ve only seen this one film, so far. I was impressed with this well-written and visually gorgeous film, so if the director is now working below his potential, that is truly a shame.
In terms of ‘what happens,’ this film could easily have been turned into a more conventional drama, like something from Dawson’s Creek. The quality of the dialogue, and the stress on character development over a standard melodramatic romance plot, really help to propel this film beyond the predictable film it could have been.
It has some beautiful cinematography, and for those who lament how so many movies these days are so rapidly edited and manipulated with CGI, this is a film where you can really enjoy looking at the visuals. There are many poetic shots where the director will linger on an image.
Here's a little sliver from Dan's review:
"... Other images and scenes that stick are the aforementioned crippled dog, the scenes in the clothing mill, where fluffs of material in the air give way to time lapse clouds over the Appalachians, and a scene where Noel confesses how she accidentally killed a boy on a fishing trip with her dad, and then scarred herself as punishment, so she would never forget the pain, among a bevy of others. These all endear, but mostly reify the characters to the audience, for this film is also shorn of so many of the stereotypes about Southern life that Hollywood seems to thrive on. This is due to the terrific screenplay by Green, adapted from a story that he and Schneider wrote. Green shows that he has a good ear for realistic dialogue, and knowing how to edit the moment so that the most seemingly mundane words take on a poetic resonance. In short, what his characters say is not particularly deep, but the ideas behind those words are. His average folk simply have grasps that surpass their reach."
Here's the trailer for the film: