tough lesson

Student and teacher play with fire in awkward drama Miller's Girl

Stories that dare to depict relationships between someone who is underage and an adult who should know better are some of the trickiest to pull off well. If not treated with enough care, a film could come off as a tacit endorsement of such a bond, an idea with which some filmmakers may be okay, but most surely want to avoid.

The new film Miller’s Girl walks that tightrope in a way that may not be as successful as writer/director Jade Halley Bartlett had intended. Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega) is a high schooler who – as she explains in the first of many voiceovers - lives alone in a big house in Tennessee, with her parents “permanently abroad.” This leaves her to her own devices, including harboring a crush on her English teacher, Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman).

With more than a little encouragement by her flirty best friend, Winnie (Gideon Adlon) – who has a crush of her own on teacher/coach Boris Fillmore (Bashir Salahuddin) – Cairo begins pursuing Mr. Miller by engaging with him about their shared love of writing, especially the work of the notoriously prurient Henry Miller. With Mr. Miller a little too welcoming of her attention, it’s clear it won’t be long until the whole situation comes to a head.

Given that the film is made by a female filmmaker, you’d figure that the point of view would be one that bends toward showing how wrong it is for a teacher to indulge in a student’s crush, no matter how much she pursues him. And while Bartlett certainly doesn’t ignore that aspect of the story, the way she structures the film gives both Cairo and Mr. Miller – as well as Winnie and Mr. Fillmore – plenty of latitude in allowing the pursuit.

The film is odd in a number of other ways, as well. Miller and his wife, Bea (Dagmara Domincyzk), share a series of weird scenes in which she is in an almost constant state of undress for no compelling reason. The majority of the film takes place at the high school, but most of the sequences feature only the two girls and the two teachers in various combinations, as if no one else were there.

Most curious of all is how the moments when Cairo and Mr. Miller get the closest are treated. They have a romantic, seductive vibe to them, with the cinematography, music, voiceovers, and a silky dress Cairo wears all combining to make it seem like Bartlett wants the audience to be okay with the two of them getting together. An unsatisfying ending only confuses matters more.

For all the story issues the film has, none of it is the fault of the actors, who give uniformly good performances, even with the thick Southern accents several of them employ. Ortega is a rising star thanks to her roles in the Scream series and Netflix show Wednesday, and she’s highly effective in this role. Freeman isn’t your typical heartthrob, but he plays the conflicted teacher part well. Adlon, Salahuddin, and Domincyzk are believable in their roles, even if their arcs are a little strange.

Perhaps other critics will have a greater insight into what Bartlett was trying to accomplish with Miller’s Girl, but this critic was left highly uncomfortable with how the story was presented.

While teacher-student relationships have happened in the real world, depicting them in a film requires a nuance that seems to be missing here.

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Miller's Girl opens in select theaters on January 26.

Photo courtesy of Lionsgate

Martin Freeman and Jenna Ortega in Miller's Girl.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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