ALL THE REAL GIRLS – david gordon green – 8.6 / 10

It would, of course, be an oversimplification to say that there are only two kinds of film dramas. There are, however, two opposing, polar opposite kinds of dramas with everything else (more or less) falling somewhere in between. On the one side you have the kind of drama that attempts to mimic life as closely as possible. The characters, settings, structure and style are almost indistinguishable from that of a documentary. Scenes can be long and meandering or short and seemingly without purpose. The actors are often not very attractive (or, if they are attractive, they’re dressed in such a way as to de-emphasize that attractiveness). The lighting is often drab. The shots are almost uniformly handheld. And, much like in life, this sort of drama almost never has any real sense of closure. For lack of a better term, let’s refer to this sort of film as ‘realist.’


The other kind of drama, the one at the opposite end of the spectrum, uses all the tools and tricks of the filmmaking trade to try to approximate the feelings of real life without actually looking all that much like life as any real person knows it. Music and montages play a key role in this sort of drama. Almost every scene has a specific point, theme or plot function to get across. The lighting and camerawork is usually quite pretty and much more formal. The actors (often some of the bigger names in Hollywood) are usually attractive and rarely ever stutter. And the stories told in this sort of drama are almost always wrapped up neatly in the end. At its worst, this sort of film is represented by every insipid romantic comedy Hollywood has ever made. At its best, it’s represented by a film like Adventureland. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to this sort of film as ‘formalist.’

Personally, I’m more inclined to like films that fall closer to the formalist end of the spectrum. I have little interest in watching a fifteen minute conversation-- shot all in close-ups with handheld cameras-- punctuated by prodigious silence just because that’s how people really talk, when a two-minute scene can convey the same emotion just as easily. That’s not to say that there are no realist films that I enjoy (nor is it to say that I enjoy all or even most formalist films), just that my personal preference on this imaginary spectrum falls closer to the formalist end.

What’s notable about All the Real Girls is that it’s my absolute favorite film from the realist end of the spectrum. Though not quite on the level of something that John Cassavettes would’ve made, All the Real Girls has many of the hallmarks of a realist film. It’s shot mostly with handheld cameras (though since it was photographed by the incomparable Tim Orr, it still looks amazing), features very naturalistic performances, has many random scenes that don’t have any real connection to the central plot of the film and has no closure at the end of it.

The reason I like the film as much as I do is that, despite its shambling approach to storytelling, it still manages to provoke a strong emotional reaction from its audience. Somehow all the random shots of two-legged dogs, smokestacks and swingsets, and snippets of conversation about what’s the greasiest thing on the menu at the diner cohere into a general feeling of hopefulness and joy in the mundane nature of average people’s average lives. All the weird asides and stuttering as characters fumble for the right words (and never quite find them) effectively evokes a feeling of average-ness that, by the end of the film, David Gordon Green is somehow able to wrangle into a coherent statement about the joys of everyday life. To be sure, it’s hard for the audience not to feel a certain kinship with these characters. Their lives and loves and hardships are so trivial, so ordinary, that the viewer can’t help but see themselves reflected in the characters. And as the characters find joy in the mundane, that sense of hopefulness seeps out of the film and transfers, in some small way, to the audience.

Though it ends up being about quite a few other things as well, All the Real Girls is mostly the story of Paul (Paul Schneider) and Noel (Zooey Deschanel, as a sort of prototype of the character she now plays exclusively) as they fall in love and try to make a go of the first serious relationship either of them has had. Both of these characters are remarkably average. Neither one is particularly bright or well spoken. Neither is likely to do much more than work a boring nine to five job, get married, have a couple kids and retire to work on their cars or play bridge with the girls. In short, Paul and Noel are a far cry from the sort of characters typically depicted in movies about blossoming love. And their conflict (trying to make a relationship work) is so mundane (and maybe even a little boring) that, for the first half of the film at least, they’re actually a little bit annoying. They don’t say anything profound either to each other or about their relationship. They have no wisdom to impart and, really, nothing useful to add to the conversation.

But as the film goes on and the viewer lives with these characters more and more, something begins to change. Maybe it’s because this sort of small scale drama is relatively rare that the viewer takes a little while to get acclimated to its particular style; or maybe it’s just that, without using any of the crutches of more traditional romantic films (like having the female character fall down a couple times so that she’s more easily relatable), it just takes a little longer for the audience to identify with these characters. But whatever the reason, as the film draws on, the very ordinariness of Paul and Noel’s relationship becomes something to be celebrated. As the realization dawns that this is what falling in love actually looks like to most people (as opposed to, say, holding a boombox over your head and blasting Peter Gabriel or declaring your love in front of a packed middle school gymnasium during the school’s talent show) Paul and Noel’s relationship takes on a sort of iconic quality that makes it quite beautiful in its ordinariness.

And it is right at the moment, right when the audience is most invested in seeing these two make it work, that Green pulls the rug out. In one of the best (if not the very best) break-up scenes ever put to film, Paul and Noel have it out. To get into specifics would be to spoil it, but suffice it to say that it’s both heartbreaking and intoxicating in its rawness and sheer emotionality. As ever, nothing either character says is particularly insightful or interesting necessarily, but the sheer power and vitality behind what they’re saying is almost overwhelming.

On top of that, Green uses a couple of clever filmmaking tricks that really drive the scene home. The most effective comes in the moment before Paul says to Noel something to the effect of, ‘I can’t even hear what you’re saying,’ when Green drops the sound out of Noel’s side of the conversation for just a moment. It’s subtle and barely noticeable on anything but a subconscious level, but it gets across, in an instant, exactly what Paul is feeling.

That moment comes after the scene has shifted from the park bench to the field just beyond. Though the actual style of the shots doesn’t change when the characters get up from the bench and start walking, there’s a strange shift— almost like a jump cut— between the two parts of the scene. It’s momentarily startling and creates in the viewer a sudden sense of being set adrift. The revelation from Noel that kicks off the fight comes out of nowhere and turns Paul’s world completely upside down. And Green, with this small trick of editing, does the same for the viewer. Even if the audience isn’t directly aware of why they feel it, they nevertheless suddenly find themselves off balance and fighting to regain their footing.

This tour de force scene is followed immediately by the most formal sequence in the film: a montage of time passing in beautiful time lapse shots of factories, skies and water towers. The sequence serves a purpose in the story (to indicate that a significant amount of time is passing) but it has other functions as well. It shows that, though Paul has been devastated, the world is continuing on with complete indifference. And it sets the stage for the third act of the film that will have both a different tone and feel and different purpose than the first two-thirds of the film.

It is in this last third where All the Real Girls moves away from being the story of one relationship and becomes a story about how average people find enough joy in their lives to go on living and looking forward to the future. It features short scenes of characters talking about how happy they are, joking about getting old and just sitting around enjoying each other’s company. As Paul and Noel try to figure out how to go on with their separate lives, Green increasingly uses the supporting cast to underline the point that what Paul and Noel have gone through is not so different from the heartaches and hardships of those all around them. And, when they get some distance from it, it will be this very heartache that has made their life worth living.

None of this, of course, is a new idea. And for his part, Green seems to recognize this. He just doesn’t care. After all, people have been falling in love for millennia, but that doesn’t diminish the power of your experience of falling in love in any way. Some truths about the human condition are so fundamental that they bear repeating over and over because they are what, in the end, make up the substance of our lives. And when they’re repeated in such a beautiful and clear-eyed way as they are here, it’s hard not to fall under their spell. All the Real Girls is a simple story told in a straightforward way that’s all the more powerful precisely because of that.