A Life of Quiet Desperation

“The Good Girl,” one of the year’s best films, opens with its heroine, Justine Last, telling us that “as a little girl you see the world like a giant candy store, but one day you look around and see a prison.”

Prison for 30-year-old Justine (Jennifer Aniston) is the Retail Rodeo, a roadside chain department store in a small West Texas town. Justine has been a cashier there for longer than she cares to remember, and at the end of her workday, home is a tract house. There, she inevitably finds her house-painter husband, Phil (John C. Reilly), and his partner and best pal, Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson), sitting around getting stoned.

On this particular day, the guys, still in their work clothes, have gotten paint all over the new couch. Phil is a sweet-natured, big teddy bear of a man, but to Justine, who bypassed college for fear of losing him, he has become “a pig who talks but doesn’t think.”

In short, Justine is living a life of classically quiet desperation. She has the curse of being more intelligent than everyone around her. She also has a sure sense of right and wrong, but her drab existence and the unreflective people who encircle her are driving her nuts.

Then her gaze lands on a new cashier (Jake Gyllenhaal), a brooding young man who keeps to himself and calls himself Holden in honor of the hero of J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.” A substance-abusing college dropout, he fancies himself a writer and soon declares that he and she, as outsiders, “get” each other. Before one can say “Madame Bovary,” Justine, feeling that Holden could represent her last chance to experience passion, decides to throw caution to the winds.

“The Good Girl” marks the second dazzling teaming of director Miguel Arteta and actor-writer Mike White. Their previous outing, “Chuck & Buck,” was also darkly venturesome. This film, which is about how the relentless dullness of the ordinary can grind a person down, has a corrosive, comically satirical tone yet never condescends to its people, who are all the more soul-shriveling for being so real.

At work, Justine has to put up with a relentlessly upbeat cosmetics sales clerk, Gwen (Deborah Rush); nerdy, super-religious security guard Corny (White), who is forever trying to get her to attend Wednesday evening Bible study; and Cheryl (Zooey Deschanel), who is as unthinking as the others but at least has enough imagination to relieve her boredom by testing the customers’ self-absorption with inserted obscenities in PA system announcements. The tall, beefy store manager (John Carroll Lynch) is a master of cliched slogans and sentiments. These people are not mere caricatures but recognizably human, which is what sets the filmmakers and their film way above the crowd.

What sets Justine apart, beyond her intelligence and conscience, is her moral imagination, which is about to be put to the test. Yet the filmmakers, having created a classically taut and spare tragicomedy, dare to leave us with a ray of hope for change and renewal.

White and Arteta are breathtakingly aware of how people talk and behave, yet the hilarious absurdity of so much of what they observe refreshingly inspires in them compassion rather than contempt. While Arteta directs with a relaxed grace, White comes up with one painfully funny line after another, some laugh-out-loud funny, others more ironic or reflective. (When a co-worker wishes Corny a happy Halloween, he replies with an amiable piousness, “I’m not a pagan myself, but thank you anyway.”)

A rigorously controlled tone is everything in a film with so delicate a balance between the comic and the serious, and cinematographer Enrique Chediak and production designer Daniel Bradford capture consistently the overwhelming, suffocating dullness of Justine’s relentlessly generic environment.

The extraordinary quality of White’s script and Arteta’s direction lifts the meticulously cast actors to the height of their abilities. “Friends” star Aniston digs deep but is never showy. Reilly reveals the tenderness, vulnerability and hidden depth that can lurk within a slob, and Nelson has some of the film’s most outrageously funny and inspired moments as a small-minded, despairing man whose unexpected opportunity to apply a fierce, narrow logic brings him a long-cherished dividend. Gyllenhaal deftly reveals that with his weirdo Holden, hapless Justine has ultimately exchanged one basically clueless male for another.

As long as films like “The Good Girl” can get made, there remains hope for an original and distinctive American cinema.

MPAA rating: R, for sexuality, some language and drug content. Times guidelines: blunt talk, adult themes and situations.

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‘The Good Girl’

Jennifer Aniston...Justine Last

Jake Gyllenhaal...Holden Worther

John C. Reilly...Phil Last

Mike White...Corny

A Fox Searchlight and Myriad Pictures presentation in association with IN-Motion AG, WMF V and Hungry Eye Lowland Pictures of a Flan de Coco production. Director Miguel Arteta. Producer Matthew Greenfield. Executive producers Kirk D’Amico, Philip von Alvensleben, Carol Baum. Screenplay Mike White. Editor Jeff Betancourt. Music Joey Waronker, Tony Maxwell, James O’Brien, Mark Orton. Costumes Nancy Steiner. Production designer Daniel Bradford. Art director Macie Vener. Set decorator Susan Emshwiller. Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes.

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