Karen Moncrieff: The Dead Girl (2006)

[Chris Knipp]

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Karen Moncrieff: The Dead Girl (2006)

A run on the wild side

Karen Moncrieff of The Blue Car (and multiple acting stints) has taken a whirlwind trip on the wild side in writing and directing this multiple-viewpoint study of serial killing and deep dysfuction that outdoes for darkness, negativity, and violence of action and language practically anything you may have seen since Patty Jenkin's 2003 Monster. The Dead Girl begins with shrill negativity depicting a sad woman (Toni Colette, in full hag mode) who finds the naked corpse of a young woman covered with blood in a field. We then spend some unpleasant time with Arden (Colette) and her abusive, disabled mother (Piper Laurie--whose verbal violence seems hard to relate to her extreme physical feebleness) and some Blue Velvet-like kinkiness between Arden and a man described as "The Stranger" (Giovanni Ribisi) who picks her up in a supermarket. The writing seems excessive in its false suggestion that Rudy (Ribisi) might himself be a serial killer; he seems ultimately less strange than Arden.

Throughout the screenplay is overwritten, the product of a feverish imagination perhaps more attuned to pulp fiction and B-pictures than everyday life -- and yet, and yet. . . police blotters and newspapers do present evidence of people like this. The film's interest surely lies in its exploration of vicissitudes primarily from women's points of view, and in its ability to look sympathetically at the bleakest lifestyles. The film's success may ultimately depend on how you respond to the final episode and the performance by Brittany Murphy as the "dead girl" during her last hours. If you accept her intensity as real, this may largely redeem the melodrama and extremism of what comes before. But that's up to you. For me the last segment worked, but several of the earlier ones seemed too downbeat to relate to.

If you make it through the initial ugliness of the "Stranger" segment, whose weakness is that it has nothing so very much to do with the "dead girl" other than the finding of her body, you're ready for a more relevant bridge episode titled "The Sister" that takes you to a forensics student, Leah (Rose Byrne), as she examines the body Arden discovered. Leah believes -- even hopes -- it could be her sister Jenny, who has been missing for several years, but her mother Beverly (Mary Steenburgen) refuses to accept this conclusion, which would have relieved the family of an endless state of unhappiness and uncertainty. James Franco, Jenny's colleague, is waiting in the wings to become her lover if she'll get over her depression, but unfortunately the tests show the dead girl was somebody else's sister and daughter, and Franco is put back on hold after an evening's lovemaking.

Weirder and more depressing is the next segment, "The Wife," focusing on Ruth (Mary Beth Hurt) and Carl (Nick Searcy), who live by and maintain a rental storage area. Ruth discovers evidence that points to her husband as a serial killer who has racked up eight victims. The starkness of this episode is worthy of a detective-story version of Samuel Beckett.

This ties in with the last episode, since when Krista, the "dead girl" (Brittany Murphy), is picked up by Carl, we know how it is going to end. Unlike Monster or the usual horror flick, the film doesn't show us murder. In the penultimate segment, "The Mother," a woman from Arapaho, Washington named Melora (an appealing Marcia Gay Harden) learns that the corpse is confimed to be of her lost girl, Krista (Brittany Murphy). Melora bravely goes to the low-life motel where Kirsta lived with a black fellow-hooker named Rosetta (Kerry Washington) and connects with her, retrieving Krista's little girl from a Latina caretaker to take back to Arapaho and offering Rosetta a home there too if she will take it. She doesn't. Finally, the last episode, "The Dead Girl," depicts Krista's final hours in which she struggles to go out to a Los Angeles suburb to give her child a birthday present but is left in the lurch by one of her Hells Angel johns (Joish Brolin) and loses precious time getting revenge on a man who beat up Rosetta. Her borrowed cycle breaks down and she is picked up by Carl. White out, finale.

The film might work better in structure if there were a sequence of revelations that didn't come so early, and if the interconnectedness were stronger. There are some powerful moments, and there is a good cast, many of whose members perform very well in the time allotted to them. The project is an ambitious one. It seems unlikely to win many mainstream friends but may justifyably develop a small cult following -- because there just aren't many films that go so far onto the wild side for so long.

[oscar jubis]

THE DEAD GIRL (USA/2006)

I approached The Dead Girl with extreme caution and relatively low expectations. I was supremely disappointed with writer/director's Karen Moncrieff's debut Blue Car, which received more favorable reviews than negative ones, including enthusiastic ones from Roger Ebert, Ella Taylor, and Lisa Schwarzbaum. I thought the script was amateurish and the lead actress miscast, among other problems.

Both Moncrieff features are about young women victimized by parental figures, which might emerge as her central preoccupation if she continues to mine this theme. Perhaps she should. The Dead Girl evidences definite growth in her writing and directing skills. It's a more ambitious film in every respect and much more accomplished. Moncrieff divides the film into five parts revolving around the murder of a young woman, a character based on the victim in a murder case in which Moncrieff served as a juror. Four parts take place after and the last one before the gruesome event, which we never witness.

The first four parts could work separately as short stories revolving around: Arden, an introverted girl (Toni Collette) verbally and emotionally abused by her mother (Piper Laurie, practically reprising her role in Carrie); a grad student preoccupied with the disappearance of her sister years ago; a neglected middle-aged wife (Mary Beth Hurt); and the distressed mother (Marcia Gay Harden) of a girl who ran away from home at 16 and has just been found murdered (the titular character played by Brittany Murphy). The ties between the first three stories and the protagonist are handled with much more subtlety and nuance than the contrived and schematic plots of similarly structured films like Crash and Babel. Each dwells on the effects of the murder on a number of women.

On the surface, it would seem that all that connects Arden to the dead girl is that she finds her corpse. Gradually, parallel stories of victimization emerge. They have both made ill-equipped and vulnerable by parental abuse; their disparate fates mostly a circumstantial matter. This first part was significantly longer than the other four then pared down at the editing stage because of how its length disrupts the flow of the narrative. Moncrieff finds images pregnant with significance to make up for script reduction and give the character of Arden the intended resonance. The short scene that precedes the titles_just a shot of Arden in bed with her mother really. It's all we need in order to know about their oppressive, enmeshed relationship. A shot of Arden against a desert landscape, with twisted, leafless Joshua trees framing her, speaks volumes about her arid existence.

The cast of The Dead Girl is impressive, top to bottom. I was particularly surprised to find Kerry Washington, who has heretofore played a series of "good girls", shining as a drug-addicted hooker. I had anticipated the well-known actors in the cast would attract a sizable audience to this independent film. Then distributor First Look screened the film in 2 theaters nationwide during the very crowded last week of 2006 and shelved it. The Dead Girl deserves to be seen. Its recent dvd release provides the opportunity.

[Chris Knipp]

Kerry Washington certainly gives her all as does Brittany Murphy--I think you're right that the best part about the movie is the performances it gets. I am a bit tired of Toni Collette's character roles though.
I had anticipated the well-known actors in the cast would attract a sizable audience to this independent film. .There is a lot of interesting stuff in this, but I found it excessively downbeat in its mood and for that reason its limited appeal is obvious. Even at the Angelika Film Center in NYC it drew few viewers. The memory of it is like an almost-forgotten nightmare. Coming in the dead of winter. . .

[oscar jubis]

*The difference between Washington and Murphy is that the latter is doing something she's done before whereas Washington is stretching the range of her previous roles.

*What provides balance to the film is Arden's story of liberation from her oppressive mother. What gives The Dead Girl distinction among "murder flicks" is the strange but credible way in which Arden finding the corpse (and her sudden notoriety) serves as a catalyst for positive growth.