Miller’s Girl

Grade: C+

I give Miller’s Girl credit for one thing: there are no fantasies, dreams, or other fakeouts. Everything we see actually happens in the real world of the movie. There are a couple of shots that made me wonder how the people in it kept a straight face during the filming. This is a weighty film – one I really wanted to like, that unfortunately gets itself bogged down with histrionics and pretentious pontifications.

21-year-old Jenna Ortega is a young actress I’ve admired since I saw her in X two years ago, and Scream VI last year. She is also well-known as Wednesday Addams in the Netflix series Wednesday, and there is lingering residue of that character carried over to her role in Miller’s Girl. She plays Cairo Sweet. She lives in a large house in rural Tennessee, and her school is just a quick walk through the foggy woods away. She lives alone most of the time, as her parents are lawyers who are almost always traveling.

Martin Freeman plays Jonathan Miller, Cairo’s English teacher. Just like “Monk” from American Fiction, he’s an aspiring author with a book out that didn’t make much noise, so doing the English professor thing is his fallback. Cairo is extremely well-read, and even knows of Mr. Miller’s book. This impresses him, and he gives Cairo perks like a head start on the midterm creative writing assignment.

Cairo has ulterior motives of which Miller is unaware. Her best friend Winnie has the hots for Coach Fillmore, and Cairo sees how she could seduce and manipulate Mr. Miller. Her college admissions essay is on the topic of their greatest accomplishment, and what a memorable one that would be.

The interminable amount of voice-over narration seems to have been written by someone with a thesaurus handy. These are some verbose, wordy people. You could also call them grandiloquent, euphuistic, ornate, and vainglorious. Other aspects are problematic; apparently the only two teachers at this school are Miller and Fillmore. We never see any others, and we almost never see students other than Cairo and Winnie. I hope to see more and more of Ortega, and it’s nice to see Freeman break out of the Marvel and Hobbit universes. He’s a gifted actor, and looks and sounds convincing as an American, rather than the jolly well English guy he is. As Miller’s wife, Dagmara Dominczyk (Priscilla, Bottoms, The Lost Daughter, The Assistant) is entertaining and has fun, but I think she wandered over from a Tennessee Williams play. She’s often drinking, smoking, wearing a neckline-revealing nightgown, and talking in a Suth’n drawl.

In a rejection email I got from Rotten Tomatoes (informing me that I had not been selected for inclusion among the critic reviews on their website), a piece of constructive criticism they gave me was that I should dig deeper – provide more analysis of subject matter and themes. Once I let the initial knee-jerk reaction to the rejection settle down, I could see what they were saying. It’s sound advice, and I would like to do that. Miller’s Girl is so lofty and bombastic. It’s hard to cut through all that to dissect the meat and potatoes. Maybe by explaining how in this instance it’s difficult to dig deeper, I am digging deeper. Miller’s Girl is a neat idea that never gets out of its own way.

Grade: C+