The Dead Girl: the slivers of universal truth

[Even though they essentially agree on the film, we thought it'd be fun to get two reviewers' takes on this one, two perspectives for the price of one! First Erin, and then James. -- ed.]

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

[Note: Release date changed to May 15.] A more cynical viewer could see the recent popularity of vignette storytelling as a desperate move for cash-strapped productions to attract big name talent to their films with the lure of a small time commitment and big showpiece scenes without the burden of having to carry an entire narrative. But the flipside of that coin is that to effectively tell those stories a director needs very good actors who can quickly engage our imaginations.

Writer/director Karen Moncrieff's film was inspired by her experiences as a juror on a murder trial after seeing the temporary community that had sprung up around the witnesses called to testify. The Dead Girl is the story of a murder that's become ghoulish normalcy in almost any part of the country: a drug-addicted prostitute is randomly killed, her mutilated body dumped in a field and discovered a few days later by a passerby. The discovery creates a small stir in the local media, but there is very little outrage and no one is ever arrested for the crime.

The first story centers around Arden (Toni Collette), an emotional invalid who's become isolated to the point of near-invisibility since the death of her brother leaving her to care for her abusive mother (Piper Laurie chewing the pages out of her old Carrie playbook). She discovers the dead girl's maimed body and her morbid, newfound celebrity with the tabloid media provides a catalyst to changing her dreary circumstance. Leah (Rose Byrne) is a student mortician who believes the dead girl could be her sister who had been kidnapped years prior. Mary Beth Hurt is a woman who suspects her husband is a serial killer and struggles to find the safest way to turn him into the police. Brittany Murphy (playing yet another brutalized, half-naked waif) gets to put a different spin on the "hooker who gets raped and murdered" trope as Krista, the titular girl. Her wonderful charisma and physicality imbues this segment with an anguished, but never glib, sense of irony.

If this film belongs to anyone, however, it's Marcia Gay Harden (who must at this point be on the collective Indiewood speed dial for maudlin, victimized matriarchs) and Kerry Washington (Last King of Scotland, She Hate Me). Harden plays Krista's mother, who comes to claim the body after years of estrangement, while Washington is Krista's roommate who provides the mother with a bit of insight about why Krista ran away many years ago.

It would be easy to say that each of these stories are so rich they could make for compelling features. What demonstrates Moncrieff's strength as a writer and director is that she can carve the slivers of universal truth out of a range of human experiences.

The DVD includes scarcely any extras, but the film itself is more than worth it.

See also: Nine Lives, 11:14, Sherrybaby, Personal Velocity, Cleo 5 to 7.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****½

It's hard to over-praise The Dead Girl, Karen Moncrieff's second full-length film as a writer/director. Her first, Blue Car, told the story of a teacher's seduction of his talented student. With Agnes Bruckner and David Strathairn in the leads, that movie managed to observe and communicate a fraught situation with unusual clarity, portioning out responsibility and guilt with gravity and sadness but without sentimentality. Moncrieff's new film is a five-part ensemble piece with more than a dozen major roles. Each lead actor--from Toni Collette to Rose Bryne, Mary Beth Hurt, Kerry Washington, Marcia Gay Harden and Brittany Murphy--is as good as she has ever been. (Holding up the male end just as expertly, if not with as much screen-time, are Giovanni Ribisi, James Franco, Bruce Davison, Nick Searcy and Josh Brolin.) Each of the stories is connected, though not in ways obvious at first glance. The centerpiece--a death--impacts the other characters and, by film's end, the viewer, too, in a manner so quiet yet profound that, by comparison, heavy-handed, we're-all-connected baubles like Crash and Babel can be seen for the stacked-deck fakes that they are.

So artfully and honestly does Moncrieff's handle her themes--primary among them women, loss and caring--and so perfectly does she attune her writing and direction to the performances of her fine cast that there is not a false moment in the entire movie. Filmmaker and cast together understand their characters so well that we come to understand them equally. In terms of humane filmmaking, it simply does not get much more powerful or resonant than this. Thankfully, rather than announcing her themes, Moncrieff has constructed her stories in such a way that they give over their small secrets and connections slowly and--for me, at least--in contemplation, well after I'd finished viewing. Though the place of women in our society seems paramount to this filmmaker, I didn't pick up any simple-minded, anti-male prejudice. Instead Moncrieff seems to possess a real understanding how society works and what women go through in it, starting, as they do, at some disadvantage--which can grow exponentially, depending on how economically burdened they become.

Movies don't come much sadder than The Dead Girl--dealing as it does with the kind of bone-deep desolation that enormous loss can bring. Yet I defy you to call this film a depressing experience. Isn't a movie that makes you feel, ponder and care this strongly some kind of blessing?