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) 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 confirmed 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 justifiably develop a small cult following -- because there just aren't many films that go so far onto the wild side for so long.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.