The Good Girl

After generating a lot of buzz at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, it's safe to say that "The Good Girl" is a good movie. Not a great movie, mind you, but a good movie. Jennifer Aniston gives what is easily her strongest big-screen performance to date (if you can accept her as an unglamorous, frumpy housewife), but even though the film raises a lot of interesting questions, it still feels too forced and contrived to ring true.

Justine (Jennifer Aniston) feels like she missed out on the good life. She's stuck in an unhappy marriage to a perpetually stoned house painter (John C. Reilly), she has a dead-end job at a never-busy retail store and she lives in a small town where nothing ever seems to happen. All that changes when she meets Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal), a young, introverted clerk who writes poetry and carries a beat-up copy of "The Catcher in the Rye" in his back pocket. They strike up an unusual friendship that leads to a passionate love affair, but it quickly turns sour when Justine learns some painful lessons about the consequences of her actions.

Since "The Good Girl" marks the second pairing of director Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Mike White--whose last outing was 2000's low-budget "Chuck and Buck"--it's not surprising that the two films have a lot in common. Both are dark comedies, and after capturing how lonely life can be in the big city in "Chuck and Buck," Arteta and White paint a similar portrait of life in a small town in "The Good Girl." On top of that, both films feature characters who walk the fine line between being passionate and being disturbed.

The main question that "The Good Girl" asks is, how far are we willing to go before we take responsibility for our actions? More to the point, how far are we willing to go before our actions affect the lives of others? Justine is faced with both challenges, and the way she handles them may not win her a lot of sympathy from the audience. In fact, by taking a bad situation and making it worse, it gets to the point where you feel sorrier for the people around her.

With TV's long-running "Friends" about to end next year after nine seasons (or so they say), the timing couldn't be better for Jennifer Aniston to show what she's made of. In "The Good Girl," she gives an assured, effective and convincing performance, but she's still a long way from going for broke the way Cameron Diaz did in "Being John Malkovich." She bonds with Jake Gyllenhaal, who is equally solid as the creepy, tortured stock boy, but possibly the main problem is the noticeable lack of genuine chemistry between them.

The supporting players tend to fall into generic small town stereotypes, but there are still some good performances to be found. John C. Reilly is e mminently likable as Aniston's stoner husband, while Zooey Deschanel steals the show as the bitter, smart-mouthed store clerk who has no respect for her customers. Tim Blake Nelson also makes his mark as Reilly's deplorable best friend who provides a crushing--albeit contrived--turning point to Aniston's spiraling situation.

There are too many noticeable coincidences in "The Good Girl" to keep it from feeling real, but it is still a well-acted, darkly comic, provocative film that's sure to make you ponder the choices you've made. Hopefully you're happy wherever you are, but if you're not, then maybe the only person holding you back from the good life...is you.