The Good Girl (2002)
Average Rating: 7/10
Reviews Counted: 156
Fresh: 127 | Rotten: 29
A dark dramedy with exceptional performances from Jennifer Aniston and Jake Gyllenhaal, The Good Girl is a moving and astute look at the passions of two troubled souls in a small town.
Average Rating: 6.6/10
Critic Reviews: 36
Fresh: 27 | Rotten: 9
A dark dramedy with exceptional performances from Jennifer Aniston and Jake Gyllenhaal, The Good Girl is a moving and astute look at the passions of two troubled souls in a small town.
liked it
Average Rating: 3/5
User Ratings: 65,157
My Rating
Movie Info
Director Miguel Arteta and writer Mike White, who had previously collaborated on Chuck and Buck, turn an eye toward suburban boredom with the quirky comedy The Good Girl. Jennifer Aniston stars as Justine, a woman who is feeling constrained by her life. Her husband, Phil (John C. Reilly), is a house painter who spends the majority of his time smoking marijuana with his friend Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson). Longing for something more in her life, Justine becomes involved with a younger co-worker named
Cast
-
Jennifer Aniston
Justine Last -
Jake Gyllenhaal
Tom 'Holden' Worther -
John C. Reilly
Phil Last -
Tim Blake Nelson
Bubba -
Zooey Deschanel
Cheryl -
Mike White
Corny -
Deborah Rush
Gwen Jackson -
John Carroll Lynch
Jack Field -
-
ADVERTISEMENT
All Critics (156) | Top Critics (36) | Fresh (129) | Rotten (31) | DVD (24)
A warmly satisfying comedy about dissatisfied people seeking to escape from the personal prison of their mundane lives in soulless suburbia.
Top CriticI wish I could say I liked it more, but despite a smattering of priceless moments, The Good Girl gets bogged down in the very narrowness that afflicts Justine.
Once fans recover from the shock, they'll discover that this sitcom actress has the chops to tackle some pretty heavy stuff.
A sad, superior human comedy played out on the back roads of life.
It's soulful and unslick, and that's apparently just what [Aniston] has always needed to grow into a movie career.
An absorbing, slice-of-depression life that touches nerves and rings true.
Arteta's third feature is good step in the right direction, for him as a disrector and for Jennifer Anniston as an actress
Jennifer Aniston is excellent in the best movie of her career.
In Miguel Arteta's quirky indie feature, Jennifer Aniston searches for meaning and passion in a swirl of suburban malaise and ironically may have finally found a character who can reveal the shades of her talent.
After languishing in second-banana roles in such films as Picture Perfect and Rock Star, Ms. Aniston here creates a fully realized character of surprising nuance and depth.
In the long run, The Good Girl will be remembered more as a chance for Jennifer Aniston to wet her acting chops than for anything else.
Aniston shows promising signs of a post-sitcom career with her convincing and understated dramatic work.
Leaves me craving for the entree.
White, who has a knack for imparting a sense of humor to his screenplays, created several minor characters who lighten the Retail Rodeo's claustrophic atmosphere.
[Aniston] manages to reveal layers of depth audiences have yet to see from her.
O humor ácido e a sensibilidade do filme com relação aos seus personagens merecem aplausos - assim como a belíssima performance de Aniston.
Aniston may not have received her much-touted Oscar nomination, but this brilliantly funny and often touching film should assure her a solid post-Friends career.
Maybe Aniston should stop trying to be serious and stick with being funny, which is something she can certainly do.
The Good Girl belongs to Aniston, who buries Rachel in style with a sweet, soulful, hangdog performance that you will be thinking of long after you leave the cinema. .
Moving, insightful and thoroughly entertaining, The Good Girl takes us to the crossroads of the human heart. The question is which way to turn/
Audience Reviews for The Good Girl
Super Reviewer
Super Reviewer
-
- Justine Last: After living in the dark for so long, a glimpse of the light can make you giddy. Strange thoughts come into your head and you better think'em. Has a special fate been calling you and you not listening? Is there a secret message right in front of you and you're not reading it? Is this your last, best chance? Are you gonna take it? Or are you going to the grave with unlived lives in your veins?
-
- Justine Last: After living in the dark for so long, a glimpse of the light can make you giddy. Strange thoughts come into your head and you better think'em. Has a special fate been calling you and you not listening? Is there a secret message right in front of you and you're not reading it? Is this your last, best chance? Are you gonna take it? Or are you going to the grave with unlived lives in your veins?
-
- Justine Last: That day I read the story Holden had wrote for me. It was kinda different from the other ones but kinda the same. It was about a girl who was put upon, whose job is like a prison, and whose life has lost all meaning. Other people don't get her, especially her husband. One day she meets a boy who is also put upon and they fall in love. After spending their whole lives never getting got, with one look they get each other completely. In the end the girl and the boy run away together into the wilderness, never to be heard from again.
-
- Phil Last: I need to get stoned
- Justine Last: Okay. Get stoned.
- Phil Last: I just gotta escape, you know? You ever feeI Iike that?
- Justine Last: Yeah
- Phil Last: Like you gotta escape?
- Justine Last: Yeah, I do.
-
- Justine Last: How it all came down to this, only the Devil knows. Retail Rodeo is at the corner on my left. The motel is down the road to my right. I close my eyes and try to peer into the future. On my left, I saw days upon days of lipstick and ticking clocks, dirty looks and quiet whisperings. And burning secrets that just won't ever die away. And on my right, what could I picture? The blue sky, the desert earth, stretching out into the eerie infinity. A beautiful never-ending nothing.
-
- Justine Last: Sometimes to get back on the road to redemption, you have to make pit stops.
Discussion Forum
There are no discussion threads for The Good Girl yet.
Latest News on The Good Girl
October 5, 2006:
Critical Consensus: "Departed" Is Best Reviewed Wide Release of 2006This week at the movies, we've got cops and robbers in Boston ("The Departed," starring...
March 22, 2006:
Molly Shannon Digs Mike White's "Dog"SNL funnygal Molly Shannon has signed on to star in the directorial debut of screenwriter Mike...
July 11, 2005:
Jack Black IS Nacho LibreFilmJerk.com brings us the early scoop on a new collaboration between Jack Black ("School of...
What's Hot On RT
Bradley Cooper's Best Movies
Fast & Furious 6 is Certified Fresh
Fast & Furious cars gallery
Blockbusters ranked!
Featured on RT
- Weekly Ketchup: Fox and Marvel Both Courting Quicksilver for Comic Blockbusters 4
- Critics Consensus: Fast & Furious 6 is Certified Fresh 58
- Red Carpet Photos with Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Gina Carano and More 0
- Video: The Hangover Part III Cast Interviews 0
- Total Recall: Bradley Cooper's Best Movies 44
- Parental Guidance: Epic and Beautiful Creatures 2
- Comic Book Movies You Can Watch Online 9
Top Headlines
-
Evan Peters Joins X-Men: Days of Future Past
0
-
Toby Jones Talks Captain America: The Winter Soldier
1
-
The Poltergeist Reboot May Actually Be a Sequel
15
-
Will Forte Promises MacGruber 2
1
-
Universal Plans Timecop Reboot
2
-
Return of the Jedi Turns 30
1
-
Vin Diesel Says Fast & Furious 7 Will Take Place in L.A.
0
Fresh Links
Featured
Star Trek Movies Ranked
HitFix offers their own take on the worst-to-best of the Enterprise crew's cinematic adventures.
Top 10 Star Trek Villains
Rolling Stone unveils the Enterprise's most irksome adversaries.
Celebrity Yearkbook Flashback
We'll bet you never realized how many stars were cheerleaders and high school athletes!
50 Most Classic Movie Moms
In celebration of Mother's Day, TimeOut offers up 50 iconic matriarchs from the big screen.
Weirdest Movie Siblings
From Twins to The Royal Tenenbaums, Moviefone explores cinema's oddest siblings.
Promos
Follow RT on Twitter!
Spice up your feed with hourly Tomatometer updates!
Foreign Titles
- Good Girl (FR)
Jennifer Aniston, in her first and last interesting film role, plays the main character, a depressed, uneducated store clerk who has an extra-marital affair with Holden that goes awry. She is married to a brainless couch potato played by John C. Reilly.
As you'd expect from this filmmaking team, there's much dark humor and deadpan comedy about small-town life. At times the spirit of Todd Solondz is channelled. But nothing really surprising or compelling is ever discovered about the characters, and the comedy grows thin after a half-hour. The actors walk around in a catatonic stupor, going way over the top to dramatize their characters' stagnation and mindlessness.
I'm not sure why it's interesting to depict everyone in the heartland as retarded. It certainly bears no relationship to the reality of the heartland, where there is a lot more diversity than that. After a while, it just seemed like easy jokes perpetrated by artists who weren't really challenging themselves.
You could think of "Good Girl" as the last mumble-core movie. I'm quite glad that this sub-genre is pretty much dead.