- The Dead Girl
Starring:Toni Collette, Marcia Gay Harden, Josh Brolin, Brittany Murphy, Kerry Washington, James Franco, Rose Byrne, Giovanni Ribisi, Mary Beth Hurt
Rated: R (Language etc.)
Release Date: DVD May 15, 2007
Writer Director: Karen Moncrieff
I got to see this movie last night on Showtime and watched the whole thing even though I hadn’t planned to. It just caught my attention and pulled me in to the point where I just had to see what happened next. Here is a brief synopsis from IMDB.com © (jhailey):
In Los Angeles, a story about a dead girl, told in five chapters. A woman, miserable in her circumscribed life caring for her domineering mother, finds a body. Somehow, this discovery allows her to change. At the morgue, the sister of a girl missing for 15 years believes the body is that of her sister; this liberates her. An older woman, married to a man who pays her little attention, finds evidence in a storage unit; how will she handle it? The mother of the dead girl, who left home some years before, visits the last place her daughter lived and makes her own discoveries. Last, we flash back to the victim’s final day.
I thought that this movie was very thought provoking and extremely well written. Not the mention that the performances by the cast were right on point. Every single character had a key role to play and you could easily empathize with each woman’s individual struggle with their circumstances. Every character’s story brought you closer to figuring out what happened to this girl that in one way or another connected them.
The story starts out with Arden (Toni Collette) who finds the body. She is completely repressed and controlled by her sadistic mother. When this body is found she seems to turn a corner in her life and set herself free. Then it moves on to the sister (Rose Byrne) of a girl whose family fell apart after she disappeared 15 years earlier. She plays this character, Leah, with a great deal of passion and really portrayed depression in a way that I could connect with.
Next it moves on to Ruth (Mary Beth Ray) who plays the neglected and frustrated wife of an introverted man. She makes a shocking discovery in a storage space of her husbands. Ruth is a character that it is easy to dislike right away and who really holds to key to the entire story. What she does with it I won’t say because it will ruin the ending.
Melora (Marcia Gay Harden) plays a mother who’s daughter ran away years ago for reasons she never understood until she finds the place her daughter last lived at. There she uncovers the heartbreaking life that her daughter was leading and why she ran away in the first place. In the end her story is filled with a renewed sense of purpose in life. Lastly Krista’s (Brittany Murphy) story fills in the remaining gaps and we find out how her last day was spent.
All the characters were important to the story and gave you a different perspective on the lives that people lead. This was one of those movies that makes an impact in your mind and stays with you, unlike most of those more expensive films that you forget the moment the credits role. I think possibly the most underappreciated role in this film was that of Rosetta (Kerry Washington) who did an amazing job portraying a character that I wouldn’t have ordinarily pictured her playing.
Bottom Line: WELL WRITTEN MUST SEE DRAMA
