Very Good Girls

Emotionally complex. A great, realistic portrayal of the challenges of a troubled family life and of love and friendship. People make mistakes, and mistakes have to be forgiven, is what this movie seems to say. This movie will have you laughing, crying, suspicious, angry and happy until the very end. It didn't really seem to me that the girls actually made a pact. That would be my main complaint about the plot. They did talk about losing their virginity, but didn't really make any plans. Other than that, a really good movie.

First-time directors don't typically draw a cast with this much potential and talent. For Very Good Girls, Naomi Foner has managed to snag two of the hottest young actresses in the business right now - Dakota Fanning and Elizabeth Olsen - and surrounded them with the likes of Richard Dreyfuss, Demi Moore, Ellen Barkin and Clark Gregg. The more cynical among us would put this casting coup down to Foner's Hollywood connections: she's penned a few screenplays in her time, but is best known as the mother of thespian siblings Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal. It's a shame that the final product doesn't dispel these suspicions. The film's awkward love/lust triangle never really convinces, and Very Good Girls spends most of its running time meandering aimlessly through the lives of characters who remain stubbornly opaque and unlikeable.

Lilly (Fanning) and Gerry (Olsen) are best friends who've grown up together, taking refuge in each other's houses when life gets too complicated in their own homes. It's their final summer together, and both girls make a pact to lose their virginity before Lilly goes off to college. Enter David (Boyd Holbrook), an artist who enchants both girls with his good looks and charm. As Gerry develops an outsized crush on David, Lilly plunges into a relationship with him - one that she awkwardly keeps a secret from her best friend. When tragedy strikes, Lilly is overcome by guilt, and the life-long friendship that binds the two girls together is sorely tested.

The trouble with Very Good Girls is that it's built around a tired old trope - two girls fight and fall out over the love of one guy - but fails to find anything refreshing to say about it. Foner's screenplay, for all that it's written by a woman, gives little to no real insight into either girl. Lilly, in particular, feels like a hollow shell drifting through the paces of her narrative, never really connecting with either David or her sketchy, amorous boss Fitzsimmons (Peter Sarsgaard - Foner's son-in-law). It doesn't help that David, as played by the stoically colourless Holbrook, is a walking cliché - in a scene meant to pass for deeply romantic, he actually makes Lilly read him poetry by Sylvia Plath in his dingy artist's loft.

Far more interesting are the home lives Foner has constructed around the two girls. Lilly struggles to come to terms with her father Edward (Gregg) cheating on her uptight mother Norma (Barkin), and migrates to Gerry's considerably more cheery, argumentative home, presided over by the loving but loud Danny (Dreyfuss) and Kate (Moore). There's so much more here to be explored: the way the two families intersect, and how these connections feed into the girls' friendship, lives and personalities. Unfortunately, Foner shoves it all into the background, focusing instead on the unfortunate love/lust triangle that's sprung up around Lilly, Gerry and David.

Foner's cast is, at least, worth the watch, although they don't quite manage to completely salvage the film or their characters. Fanning plays Lilly as tremulously lost, and Olsen lends her own charms to an otherwise paper-thin character who feels more like a plot device than a person. Barkin comes off best out of the entire adult cast, unearthing a little of the sorrow that haunts a woman whose husband has been conducting an affair in their own home.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who watches Very Good Girls that the movie was written twenty years ago. In many ways, the film feels hopelessly outdated. Foner makes minor edits to the script to update it to the present, which largely involve Lilly never charging her mobile phone so that she can only be contacted on a landline. But, in the larger scheme of things, the film seems out of touch with the girls of its title, miring them in adolescent angst over the same boy while failing to make them stand on their own as characters.

Lilly (Dakota Fanning) and Gerri (Elizabeth Olsen) are two best friends on their last summer before college. They meet David (Boyd Holbrook) selling ice cream at the beach who takes Lilly's picture as they walk away. Lilly catches her father cheating with one of his patients. Gerri is infatuated with David. Lilly also likes David but she can't tell Gerri. Lilly works on a ferry tour under the lecherous eyes of her boss Fitzsimmons (Peter Sarsgaard).

I want to like this movie for the two leads. There is just something unoriginal and outdated about this movie. In fact, I thought this is a period piece at first. The writing is so uninspired. Naomi Foner is the writer and director. I don't really have any big problems with her directions. It looks fine especially for her debut. The writing doesn't have anything compelling to say. The story meanders. There is a tired feel about everything in this movie. This should be a better coming-of-age movie for two skilled actresses. The story throws a lot of stuff on the screen but nothing actually sticks.

Silly movie about two girls who throw themselves at a boy they barely know.

"We got to get over this hump."

Very Good Girls was on my radar ever since I heard it was debuting in last year's Sundance Film Festival. The reason I was attracted towards this despite not knowing anything about the plot was the cast. It starred Elizabeth Olsen who I've been a fan of ever since Martha Marcy May Marlene and Dakota Fanning who I think hasn't matched that same potential she had as a child actress. The supporting cast included Demi Moore, Peter Sarsgaard, Clark Gregg, and Richard Dreyfuss so I was really looking forward to what they could do. This was also the feature film debut from director Naomi Foner who had written a couple of screenplays in the past, but is best known for being the mother of the talented actors, Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

You would never guess this screenplay was written by a woman considering these young teenage girls have no personality and their entire lives seem to revolve around this guy they met at a beach. He is the only thing they talk about and both girls end up falling for him, which is pretty much the basic theme of this film as their friendship is tested by their personal feelings towards him. Dakota Fanning and Elizabeth Olsen play these young girls who want to lose their virginity before going to college. The guy they both fall for is played by Boyd Holbrook and I really wasn't a huge fan of his performance. I couldn't see why these girls would fall for him as he lacked personality and wasn't really charming either. Both Fanning and Olsen come from very different families. Olsen's parents are played by Richard Dreyfuss and Demi Moore who are very talkative and liberal, while Fanning's parents are played by Clark Gregg and Ellen Barkin and they are much more reserved. The parents don't get much screen time so they weren't really developed very well and all the information we gather from them is through the conversations the two girls have about how they view them (which is almost entirely negative). So that was a big let down for me because I was interested in what these actors could bring to the drama. There is nothing really that engages the audience since none of the characters have any personality whatsoever and not even the love triangle seems too appealing due to the lack of romantic chemistry. The film is only 90 minutes long but it seemed to drag forever and the score didn't help out either. I was hugely disappointed by Very Good Girls and I understand now why it took so long to reach a wider audience after the Festival.

Unfortunately the talented cast is wasted in this film and not even my appreciation for Elizabeth Olsen engaged me. I didn't even like her character very much here and much less the rest of the cast. Olsen has to find better roles because her latest films haven't exploded her potential very well. I was amazed to see how little Demi Moore and Richard Dreyfuss were used in this film; there could have been a better movie somewhere if they were given more importance. The lack of personality from any character just makes this film even more boring and tedious. There have been so many good coming of age films over the past year that this film simply fails to reach the bar that was set so high by Kings of Summer, The Way Way Back, and The Spectacular Now. This could have been an opportunity for two strong female leads but they simply didn't have much to work with.