MILLER'S GIRL - Mark Reviews Movies

Miller's Girl, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 25, 2024

Eighteen-year-old Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega) wants to be a writer, but she is, from her perspective, stuck in Tennessee. There's so much more to life and the world than she has ever experienced during her sheltered existence, as the daughter of wealthy and regularly absent parents, living alone for significant amounts of time in an old, isolated manor. At the start of Miller's Girl, Cairo narrates that she's basically a ghost.

It's a fine description for this young woman, who walks to and from her high school through the forest, emerging from the fog in such a quiet and unassuming way that we might wonder if the description is a literal one. No, there's no such twist or revelation in writer/director Jade Halley Bartlett's debut movie, which almost seems to be begging for something so bluntly mysterious.

There is a mystery or two of sorts here, having to do with Cairo's relationship with her new writing teacher Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman), a multiply frustrated author whose main success has been the publication of a collection of short stories that no one read. When Cairo shows up to Miller's class an hour early, he notices a copy of that book among the pile of her reading materials, so one of those readers, apparently, is this student, who appreciates literature as much as he does. He can't help but be flattered.

The big questions of this story, then, involve what these characters want from and expect of each other. To say it all feels a bit obvious from the start is an understatement. Bartlett's dialogue can be clever and cryptic in the screenplay's best moments, as the teacher and student play something of a game in how much they're willing to say outright, how they keep some thoughts to themselves, and how all of it wrapped up in discussions of their shared love for reading and writing.

Boundaries are crossed, to be sure, and we can see the lines blurring and breaking as the two spend more time together before, after, and outside of class. Is it all the innocent stuff of an aspiring writer and the man who's happy to be her mentor, or is this guy so miserable in his personal and professional lives that he's looking for or trying to create an opportunity for their relationship to cross from something professional to something personal?

There are two issues with this mystery of motive. The first is simply one of perspective, in that Bartlett wants us to see things from the points of view of both of these characters. Details emerge in their scenes apart that color our view of who each of them really is, and since so much of this story is about people talking about anything other than what they actually want, those moments of action speak volumes. At a certain point, the only, real mystery is whether something does or doesn't happen when Miller and Cairo are alone, and by that point, it almost doesn't matter. The end result is pretty much inescapable as soon as that first step over the professional line of this relationship has been taken.

The other issue is a matter of casting. Both Freeman and Ortega are fine actors in general and, under the circumstances, generally fine in these roles, bringing a lot between those lines of dialogue. Something is off about the combination of the two in those separate, quiet moments. Freeman is too mousy and defeated here to be seen as anything other than an older man and teacher who finds himself too flattered by the young woman and student's interest in him, his advice, and his writing.

Meanwhile, Ortega brings a degree of cunning to every word and her very physicality that communicates at least one vital element of Cairo's character well before it seems worthy of our attention. Is this just bored teenage cynicism, or does it tell us something else? A scene in which Cairo and her best friend Winnie (Gideon Adlon), who has a crush on the school's coach (played by Bashir Salahuddin)—who also happens to be Miller's best friend—and a larger crush on Cairo, stage a photo for the coach's extracurricular enjoyment says it all. Considering how much thought Bartlett puts into the way these characters speak, it's a surprise the filmmaker seems to miss how loudly her characters' behavior speaks.

The friend-coach subplot is too much, as is the character of Miller's wife, who's played with an admirable degree of drunken sensuality by Dagmara Dominczyk. The character, an actually successful author who's too busy writing and talking to her agent to pay much of any kind of attention to her husband, is so over-the-top in the manner she so constantly, precisely belittles and emasculates Miller that it defines him more than anything the man says or does. It's almost a joke, no matter how seriously the movie takes it.

The last question, then, is whether Miller's Girl fails at playing the real game it's playing or if there simply isn't much of one in the first place. Either way, the whole of this story turns out to be an anticlimax.

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