a review by Jeffrey Overstreet
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Written and directed by Kevin Smith; director of photography, Vilmos Zsigmond; edited by Mr. Smith and Scott Mosier; music by James Venable; production designer, Robert Holtzman; produced by Mr. Mosier; released by Miramax Films.
103 minutes. Rated PG-13.
STARRING: Ben Affleck (Ollie Trinke), Liv Tyler (Maya), George Carlin (Bart Trinke), Stephen Root (Greennie), Mike Starr (Block), Raquel Castro (Gertie), Jason Biggs (Arthur) and Jennifer Lopez (Gertrude Steiney).
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Jersey Girl would be just another formulaic “Worldly Guy Learns to Be a Family Man” movie if it weren’t for two things: Kevin Smith’s inescapable sincerity about the joys of fatherhood and his ongoing obsession with sex talk.
Thus, the movie will yank on the heartstrings and stuff lumps into the throats of the most cynical viewers. And it will severely offend the more conservative viewers who saw the cute-as-a-button little girl in the previews and thought they were going to “a family movie.”
Smith is notorious for the trashy language in his films, so anybody familiar with him will know what they’re getting into. It’s his first PG-13 outing, so you’d expect it to be cleaner. And it is … clean-er. Unlike the unrelenting profanity and gutter humor of Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Dogma, this film manages occasionally to try some more mature forms of dialogue, especially when the little tyke is around.
But don’t think Smith has been tamed. When the central character Ollie Trinke (Ben Affleck) meets the cute’n'geeky video store clerk Maya (Liv Tyler), with whom he will obviously fall in love (because it seems she’s the only girl his age in town AND she’s Liv Tyler), their first conversation is about how often he watches pornography. On their first date, the subject of choice is how often they both masturbate. When he confesses that he hasn’t been with a woman since his marriage ended several years ago, she’s dragging him off for what she calls “a mercy jump.” What’s a mercy jump? Well, if you can’t figure it out… perhaps I should back up and set the stage.
The film opens with a quick short story about Gertrude (Jennifer Lopez), the sexy publisher who became Ollie’s first true love. It follows them through marriage to the birth of their adorable daughter Gertie. (The wedding scene was removed from the film to keep the audience from getting distracted by thoughts of the REAL wedding between Affleck and Lopez that was canceled at the last minute. Yeah… like the audience isn’t thinking about that already.) Ollie and Gertrude seem prepared to live happily ever after, so you know something awful is going to happen. Sure enough it does, and they are parted forever, leaving Ollie, a busy Hollywood publicist, with an infant in tow.
So the real story kicks in after that. Ollie goes to stay with his dad, a street-sweeper and garbage collector in New Jersey, while he tries to piece his life back together. His grouchy father (George Carlin, in fine form) is determined to make a responsible father out of Ollie. A breakdown of some kind is inevitable, and shortly thereafter, filled with confusion, pain, and rage, Ollie loses his temper at the wrong moment and bad-mouths one of his own clients in public. This results not only in a lost job and public embarrassment, but because the aforementioned criticized client happened to be the up-and-coming star Will Smith, Ollie’s notorious error makes him unemployable in Hollywood.
Seven years later, Gertie (played by Raquel Castro) has grown up into a terrifying kid-terrifyingly cute and terrifyingly intelligent. Castro plays Gertie with all of those delightful, slightly Disney-esque qualities that Hollywood looks for in a kid actor. In the scenes she and Affleck have together that aren’t dominated by big obvious soundtrack-selling pop songs, they develop adequate chemistry for us to care about them.
Similarly, when Ollie meets the sexy local video store clerk, they strike up enough chemistry for us to feel comfortable knowing that they will end up together. We know they will, no matter what transparent “obstacles” are thrown into their path by the necessity of Hollywood convention.
When Maya learns of Ollie’s recent hardships, that’s when the aforementioned “mercy jump” is offered. For a moment I thought Smith was going to undermine anything he had to say about family by endorsing hasty and indulgent pre-marital sex (I mean, crikey! He practically condones pornography as therapy in the film.) But, just as he has done in earlier films, Smith finds a way at the last possible moment to steer his characters elsewhere and to offer them an elbow-in-the-ribs about their irresponsibility.
That’s what Smith does as a filmmaker. He presents us with young people, the way many young people live, the way they talk, the way they misbehave. And then he slowly shows a better person emerging. People who run from his films because they are offended are missing the point. Smith is a romantic and a realist. That’s worth something. To say that the film is courageous in its moral stand would be overstating it, but hey, these days, the basics that Smith goes out of his way to affirm are something to be thankful for.
It’s great to see Ben Affleck doing what he does best. Even though it’s nearly impossible to see him as a character instead of as Ben Affleck, he can still be a likeable, engaging screen presence in these lightweight dramas, just as he was in Chasing Amy, Good Will Hunting, Bounce (dumb movie, good performance) and the underrated Changing Lanes.
In their early scenes together, Affleck and Lopez seem like such a natural fit, such a likeable pair, that it made me remember how I used to like them as actors. They were, at one time, promising new talents who lit up the movies they were in. We like seeing them together in this movie. Thus, we end up feeling bad about how much we soaked up the press about their troubled relationship and break-up. We feel bad for laughing at Gigli. Or maybe we should.
It’s also a joy to see Liv Tyler set free from the slow-motion and soft focus of The Lord of the Rings. She’s convincingly giddy as the reckless and alarmingly irresponsible video store clerk. You can tell she’s just thrilled to be out of the long gowns and the pointy ears and playing a human being again.
The rest of the cast are well-chosen. Steven Root proves that he’s one of Hollywood’s great chameleons, almost unrecognizable in the ditch-digging gear of a city worker. (He’s in another film opening this week-The Ladykillers-in which he looks like an entirely different human being.)
Smith employs some fantastic cameos as well, but if I told you who shows up, I’d spoil the jokes.
This film was hyped as “Kevin Smith makes a grownup movie.” That’s not entirely true. He’s made a film in which he expresses his strong feelings about the importance of fatherhood and family commitments, written with the same excessive sex-talk and directed with the same amateur skill of his previous films. It is unmistakably a Kevin Smith film. Perhaps “a grownup Kevin Smith film” is too much for us to hope for, if by “grownup” we mean “sophisticated” and “mature.” But Smith is a grownup, and his counter-cultural discernment about fatherhood and fidelity enrich his otherwise mediocre filmmaking. The fact that he talks like the kids you don’t want your kids to be around on the schoolyard may unfortunately be something he’ll never outgrow, but we can take some comfort in the fact that this will draw in an audience that would otherwise never go to a film that glorifies the virtues of family life.
If there is anything truly artful about the film, it is the cinematography of Vilmos Zigmond. Yes, that Vilmos Zigmond-the master who filmed Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Zigmond makes this a far better-looking film than it deserves to be (another quality the film has in common with The Ladykillers).
For all its strengths, Jersey Girl’s plot becomes more and more predictable as it goes. Will Daddy do what he wants to do and go to the city for the big job interview? Or will he attend his daughter’s school play? What do YOU think?
But if you’ve decided to stick with Smith through this trash-talking valentine to the sunshine at the end, you’ll probably find, as I did, that the perfectly staged finale, for all of its predictability, is so jam-packed with sincerity and contagious joy that it just socks you one. Even as the critic in me raged against the clichés, I found a big old lump in my throat and blinked back a few tears. There’s something powerful about seeing characters who seem somewhat realistic actually caring about each other. It makes us wish it were true. Maybe there are some dads out there who would give up their personal dreams in order to fulfill the dreams of the daughters they love.