David Gordon Green's All the Real Girls is a movie of moments
and emotions, atmosphere and scenery, awkwardness and craft. He
has been nominally compared to the similarly elusive Terence Malick,
but at the tender age of 28 seems prepared to surpass his elder's
sparse output. They both have been given the dubious distinction
of being called impressionist directors who strive for a certain
cinematic poetry in their work -- Malick with landmark films such
as 1973's Badlands and more recently 1998's The Thin
Red Line, Green with 2000's George Washington and this
year's All the Real Girls.
Like Malick, Green seems to be searching for a truth that
lies in between the spoken lines of his characters, using moody
music (from fave indie-rock artists such as Will Oldham, Sparklehorse
and Mogwai) to coat his scenes with a sense of foreboding. His
scripts feel like beat poetry with a Southern drawl as he paints
pictures of small-town ennui. (Both films are set in his adopted
state of North Carolina, where he attended art school.) His
characters can sound utterly real and surreal within a span
of seconds; sometimes it resonates, other times it ricochets.
Through it all, Green is quickly establishing himself as one
of the most talked-about young directors out there, the indie
auteur who works for chump change in return for final cut. Collaborating
with co-screenwriter/actor Paul Schneider, Green creates films
that have many critics gushing with praise and others scratching
their heads.
Regardless, David Gordon Green is quickly becoming a cinematic
voice of the South; his passion for the region (and apparently
the novel) earned him the nod from producers Steven Soderbergh
and Scott Rudin to direct the soon-to-be-filmed version of John
Kennedy Toole's iconic novel, A Confederacy of Dunces,
sometime in the unknown future.
Green is scheduled to present All the Real Girls at
this year's New Orleans Film Festival. The film is microcosmic
of this year's lineup, which feels more like a "greatest hits"
celebration of previous film festivals, most notably last February's
Sundance Film Festival. Programming the up-and-coming independent
films was an especially dubious task this season, so NOFF artistic
director John Desplas took advantage of the independent film-challenged
New Orleans market and booked several festival faves.
Three of these movies -- All the Real Girls, Peter
Hedges' Pieces of April and Tom McCarthy's The Station
Agent -- combined to give their common star, New Orleanian
Patricia Clarkson, a Special Jury Performance Prize at Sundance.
(All the Real Girls also shared a Sundance Special Jury
Prize "for artistic merit and emotional truth.") Andrew Jarecki's
Capturing the Friedmans captured the Grand Jury Prize
for Best Documentary at Sundance, while Alexander Sokurov's
Russian Ark won the Visions Award at the 2002 Toronto
International Film Festival. Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's
Diary won several honors including Best Film at the 2002
SITGES Film Festival, while The Murder of Emmett Till
earned director Stanley Nelson an Emmy nomination for best director
of a nonfiction program.
Green is also coming to town for post-production sound editing
and mixing at Swelltone Labs for his latest film, The Undertow
(co-written with Joe Conway), about two brothers in the South
trying to guard a family secret after the death of their father.
Shot in Savannah, Ga., The Undertow features Jamie Bell
(Billy Elliot), Josh Lucas (Sweet Home Alabama)
and Dermot Mulroney (About Schmidt). The film is scheduled
for release some time next year.
Green's All the Real Girls -- like George Washington
-- is set in a decaying, stuck-in-time North Carolina town whose
young inhabitants are barely getting by. Paul (Paul Schneider)
is trying to erase his reputation as the one who's gone "down
in every girl's history book as the asshole ex-boyfriend," as
a friend reminds him. Paul is falling in love with Noel (Zooey
Deschanel), the younger sister of his best friend, Tip (Shea
Wigham), who doesn't like what he's seeing develop between the
two closest people in his life.
Green is at his best when charting the fumbling, bumbling
path that first love takes, when partners talk about things
light and heavy, trying to stave off foreplay with wordplay
or endless snuggles. And it's in those snuggles that Green and
Schneider's writing reaches for a quirky poetry that sometimes
eludes them. During yet another extended embrace where you can't
tell where one person ends and the other begins, Noel tells
Paul, "I had a dream that you grew a garden on a trampoline,
and I was so happy that I invented peanut butter."
It's all part of a jaunty storytelling rhythm, juxtaposing
time-filling banter with dialogue, monologue and imagery rife
with portentousness. There's a lot of "let's try this" improv
going on here -- in the narrative, the acting and Tim Orr's
cinematography -- and the notion that not all of it works or
might not even cohere altogether shouldn't detract from the
efforts of a director willing to take chances.
"This movie is kind of an alternative to a lot of the movies
that are just constantly moving and aggressively beating you
over the head with plot points," Green tells Schneider during
their commentary for the DVD. "We can sit back and listen for
a little bit and look at these people and this place."
In a movie filled with counterpoints, the most tender moment
comes when the pair don't have sex, as Paul almost talks
his way out of the mood because of his awareness of his checkered
romantic past. "I'm gonna go now," he says, realizing the time
has passed.
"I think what we were shooting for were those awkward moments,
those moments of absolute vulnerability," Green says in his
commentary.
Green tries to populate his North Carolina burg with a string
of idiosyncratic characters masked as everymen or women, some
of whom are utterly hilarious. Even though some of the nicknames
seem overly hickish or knowing, the actors come through, particularly
Danny McBride as Paul's under-matched romantic rival Bust-Ass.
(After unsuccessfully extracting from Noel her "backup" potential
boyfriend, Bust-Ass finally quizzes, "Who would you have sex
with more: me, or a preacher?")
For whatever quirks he might have in his screenwriting collaborations
with Schneider, Green does a remarkable job in getting both
Schneider and Deschanel to thoroughly inhabit their characters.
Deschanel's Noel is all unwashed hair and bright blue eyes (it's
curious that almost every other girl in the film is having a
better hair day), which lends to her naturalness. Even if she
is discussing the possible invention of peanut butter, Deschanel
makes it all seem believable. She's a real, sincere, open book
of a charmer, honest with everything including her own naivete,
keeping men off balance with a "shhhh" that is both cute and
mysterious.
Green splices these moments with transitional images of rusty
and rustic Americana: a river stream, a burned-out bus, mountains
at sunrise, a two-legged dog.
"Oftentimes it's these long, lingering shots that give actors
a lot of breathing room," Schneider says in his DVD commentary.
"It lets the actor invest his ideas in the movie."
Schneider's Paul is a poster boy for the ennobled doofus;
as his mom (Patricia Clarkson) points out, he's not the brightest
bulb in the lamp. He's screwed up a ton, but he's still young
enough to seek a new, truer path, and thinks he's found a fresh
start in Noel. It doesn't matter that Noel, just out of boarding
school and smarter than she is wise, trusts Paul. And Schneider
spends much of the film in a limbo of desire and self-doubt.
Sometimes his best lines are a stutter. That Noel pulls a surprise
on him toward the end of the film just further muddies the waters
for an easily confused kid.
Is this just karma coming back to bite Paul in the ass? Or
is this just another way of showing how confusing first love
can be? Can two young lovers find each other through all that
talking and shrugging? The answers are as elusive as Green's
lines, perhaps intentionally so.
Which makes Green's selection as the man to help the long-awaited
and much-anticipated film version of A Confederacy of Dunces
so intriguing. The most celebrated book about New Orleans --
author John Kennedy Toole won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize --
is as known as Green's work is ambiguous. Green reportedly is
a huge fan of the work and campaigned Steven Soderbergh and
Scott Rudin heavily to get the job. Drew Barrymore, who will
provide her production company for the film, reportedly is set
to co-star along with Will Ferrell, Mos Def, Olympia Dukakis
and Lily Tomlin.
Whatever happens, one thing is certain: Green will provide
his own unique stamp on the film. If his first two movies are
any indication, A Confederacy of Dunces will at the very
least have a poetry all its own.
David Lee Simmons will interview David Gordon Green at
a Mentoring Session at 1 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 12, at Jonathan Ferrara
Gallery, 841 Carondelet St. The New Orleans Film Festival will
also screen David Gordon Green's first film, George Washington,
at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 14, at Canal Place.
