Small Towns Needn’t Be This Dreary

We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.

--Barry Mann and Cynthia

Weil’s song, “We Gotta Get Out

of This Place”

*

The yearning of small-town residents to experience something more than their thwarted lives belongs in any catalog of the recurring themes of American fiction, drama and cinema. “I’m suffocating in this dead-end town. No one understands me,” their lament goes. “I was meant for something better, wasn’t I?”

Such frustrations are at the heart this year of both “The Good Girl,” a surprisingly well-received independent film starring Jennifer Aniston, and “Empire Falls,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard Russo. But although the novel revels in the foibles of its colorful townies, “The Good Girl” is consistently dour and shallow, failing to find the humanity in characters it can only ridicule.

That the book brings existence in a moribund Maine town so entertainingly to life and that the movie is as dreary as its scruffy Texas burg and the banal residents stuck there can’t be attributed to Russo taking nearly 500 pages for his tale. If “The Good Girl” were a 16-hour miniseries, it would still lack what “Empire Falls” has in abundance--affection for its characters.

That crucial difference in attitude raises a question: Can Hollywood portray real people, especially everyday working people, or is every attempt destined to be poisoned by condescension? The task is more difficult in comedies, where the line between laughing with the downwardly mobile or at them is frequently crossed.

Russo acknowledges that avoiding patronizing unsophisticated characters is as important as it is tricky. “If you buy into the notion that small towns are nothing but jerkwaters, and if you can’t find it in yourself to believe that there are smart, decent people who live there, then you are in very dangerous territory,” he says. “You can’t be dismissive.”

“The Last Picture Show,” Peter Bogdanovich’s film based on a Larry McMurtry novel, had compassion for its lonely characters as well as a vivid sense of place. But that was released in 1971. More recently, the Coen brothers have successfully built comedies around rural rubes, including the loving if misguided young couple played by Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter in “Raising Arizona.”

“Sweet Home Alabama,” last weekend’s box office champion, rests its revulsion for small-town life on the shoulders of Reese Witherspoon, who is so likable that she doesn’t wither under its weight.

A romantic comedy sprouting from another chestnut of a theme--there’s no place like home--”Sweet Home” does a poor job of persuading us that Alabama’s worth returning to for Witherspoon, who fled her humble past so emphatically that she left skid marks. After dumping on life in the boonies, the movie in its final moments becomes a fairy-tale testimonial to the power of animal attraction: The only thing in recliner country that doesn’t sicken the nouveau city slicker heroine is the hunky honey she left behind.

As nasty as she is, it’s amazing the locals let her stay. But of course they would; they’re just loser hicks.

The 1994 film of Russo’s novel “Nobody’s Fool” took place in an unlovely town in upstate New York. “One of the reasons ‘Nobody’s Fool’ did so well,” the author says, “is it began with a novel that was not condescending to its characters. Both [director] Robert Benton and [producer] Scott Rudin would have caught any whiff of condescension.”

Lead Paul Newman “is an American icon movie star, but he’s also really the boy who ran away from Cleveland so he wouldn’t have to work in the sporting goods business,” Russo says. “We had an oddly perfect team on that movie. It’s pretty rare that Hollywood gets it right.”

For the wisecracking cast of “Nobody’s Fool,” poverty and wit are not mutually exclusive.

But director Miguel Arteta’s “Good Girl” is humor-impaired. The character may be intrinsically decent, but smart? Not so much. In fact, intelligence seems to have been all but eliminated from the gene pool from which Justine Last (Aniston) and everyone she knows sprang. The movie finds her a depressed 30-year-old Texan who spends her days at the cheerless superstore she hates and her nights in front of an unreliable TV with the pothead housepainter husband she tolerates.

Justine begins to register a pulse when a goo-goo-eyed post-adolescent comes to work at the Retail Rodeo. They exchange soulful looks, progress to stumbling stabs at conversation that they eagerly interpret as meaningful and, before you can say Madame Bovary, Justine and Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal) are canoodling in cars, motels and at work. She wouldn’t be the first woman to mistake mental instability for depth.

Although it’s nominally a comedy (written by Mike White), several of “The Good Girl’s” attempts at humor induce more cringes than chuckles, including her husband’s difficulty producing a sperm sample at a fertility doctor’s office and her acquiescence to trading sex with a creep for his silence about her affair.

The most egregious examples of the film’s tendency to tinge gags with cruelty occur when Justine and a co-worker in the cosmetics department subject elderly women to makeovers that transform the clueless women into Halloween grotesques.

“The Good Girl” got a measure of positive attention because it seemed to be Aniston’s breakout role, proof that she had more to offer than a cute figure and responsive hair. But anyone who could see “Friends” and not be aware of her superb comic timing should be sentenced to watching a marathon of badly cast, inferior sitcoms.

Her authentic performance in “The Good Girl” struggles against a weak screenplay. There is no movement from dark to light, only from hapless to hopeless. Justine’s behavior lacks internal logic. After realizing that her young lover is, in the worst way, a child, she still agrees to run away with him. Her dilemma isn’t funny, only pathetic.

Justine and the movie suffer from the same problem: a paucity of ideas. Jake’s parents and Justine’s husband and his best buddy are almost always parked in front of a flickering TV screen. The habit of staring at the tube might work to define a character or two, but is there no other way to show that the town is full of people who are boring and disengaged?

Of course, Justine’s depressed. She has no drive. If she longed to be a beach volleyball player, to become a hostess on QVC or to bump into Carson Daly in Times Square, the contrast between her ambition and reality would chafe. (Hence “we gotta get out of this place” can give way to another reliable plot, the American penchant for self-reinvention. See Gatsby, Jay.) Justine fails to break our hearts because she doesn’t even have enough energy to dream.

“Empire Falls” is set in the graveyard of broken dreams. A Northeastern industrial town in decline, it was the place that 42-year-old Miles Roby, manager of the Empire Grill, was supposed to escape. Hard luck and loyalty have kept him there, surrounded by a sarcastic ex-wife, the teenage daughter he adores, and assorted townsfolk so venal, dumb or vain that no other place would have them.

“I don’t see the people I write about as boring,” Russo says. “I think they’re fascinating. It takes me three or four years to write a novel. I have no more desire to spend three or four years with boring fictional characters than I’d want to be with real boring people that long. I had a wonderful time sharing company with all those folks. Even people with limitations are complex. People’s limitations often make them interesting.”

They do in Russo’s fiction. They don’t in “The Good Girl.” If it was easy to create characters like Miles’ father, Max, an alcoholic rascal who lives to take advantage of anyone careless enough to let him, everyone would do it.

Like Justine, Miles is too passive for his own good. It seems happiness will always elude them both. But by the end of the novel, Russo says, “Miles has become that thing that we all hope to be one day, a fully vested grown-up. He has put away childish things. He decides he’d rather be an adult in Empire Falls and he knows what’s important to him. That’s a fair definition of a grown-up, in this society.”

If only “The Good Girl’s” filmmakers didn’t feel so superior to their characters, they might have found some wit, depth and a believable ending too. But perhaps they delivered just what they intended, a wallow in a place where the word “good” has dark connotations. They wouldn’t be the first artistes to mistake cynical for clever.