THE GIRL NEXT DOOR - luke greenfield - 6.3 / 10

Better than it has any right to be but not quite good enough to be recommended without reservation, The Girl Next Door is an interesting film nonetheless. The music selection is outstanding and goes a long way to making the film watchable. Emile Hirsch and Elisha Cuthbert are both extremely likeable and entertaining (although Cuthbert is terribly miscast and her fingernails draw my attention in the same way as a train wreck). And the supporting players are just a ton of fun.

That notwithstanding, the film still has some major flaws. Foremost among them is the two or three too many moments of cringe-inducing embarrassment for Hirsch's Joel Goodson--err Matthew Kidman (that name a very strange, sideways reference to Tom Cruise). A seventeen year-old boy dating a worldly and experienced porn star would, obviously, lead to a few sweaty palms moments for the boy. But there's a fine line between entertaining and amusing embarrassment and over the top, makes you want to look away from the screen embarrassment. The former, like when Danielle (Cuthbert) makes Matthew strip in the street as punishment for his having watched her undress, is cute and titillating and does a good job of dramatizing the awkward interactions of people just discovering their sexuality. The latter, like when Matthew, on ecstasy, gives a speech on moral fiber, is one of those only-in-the-movies moments that does nothing but make you think of all the other movies you've seen that have moments that are just like this one.

The end of the film also doesn't complete the action as well as it should. The quest to get $25,000 is like a misguided detour into another, much worse, film. It doesn't have anything in common tonally with the rest of the film and doesn't reveal anything interesting about the people in the film. It seems that this whole subplot is just a way to end the film in a grandiose way, as if just having the characters learn something about themselves wouldn't be big enough to hang the climax of the film on. The problem there is that the character problems, the problems of the mind, are what's interesting about the film in the first place. If I wanted to watch teenagers engaged in some ridiculous hijinx I'd watch American Pie. By making the final third of the film about an external conflict rather than an internal one, the filmmakers invalidate everything interesting that came before. And that's really a shame because the first two thirds of the film are resonant and entertaining.