THE STARLING GIRL - Mark Reviews Movies

The Starling Girl, Bleecker Street

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 11, 2023

How does a person find one's true purpose in life among people who believe there is only one purpose in life? That's ultimately the central question of The Starling Girl, which follows a 17-year-old girl who has only known life within a tight-knit community of religious fundamentalists.

This is an insulated world that allows no wiggle room for any kind of belief beyond that an existence entirely devoted to a particular understanding of a divine power. The rules are as superficial as what kind of clothes people, mainly women, should wear and as all-encompassing as the notion that there is no concept of the individual. After all, a person's life belongs to the community and that higher power, so within this philosophy, anything outside of those concerns would be a pointless distraction or a sin.

In her feature debut, writer/director Laurel Parmet makes that point entirely clear, but it never digs much deeper than expressing that idea. Instead, the story finds Jemima "Jem" Starling (Eliza Scanlen) in a state of constant fear of having her innate hopes and desires found out by her family or the community at large. It feels oppressive, yes, just as it should, but Parmet's screenplay never quite taps into the potential that these characters, especially the main one, have internal lives and drives that aren't defined by or that don't become melodramatic situations.

On the cusp of official womanhood, the traditions of this community expect Jem to do two things with the rest of her life. First and foremost, she must continue holding the faith into which she was born. Second, she must marry a man, almost certainly a match arranged by her parents and the parents of a suitor who see her as a beneficial partner, and start a family.

That's it, really, and near the start of the story, Jem's parents—Paul (Jimmi Simpson), who is relatively less strict in his religious adherence and spends most of the movie self-destructively dealing with vague doubts, and Heidi (Wrenn Schmidt), who's devout to the core—have found their daughter a perfect match. That the young man is Ben (Austin Abrams), the younger son of the church's pastor (played by Kyle Secor), is a big deal, especially to Heidi.

A couple of things get in the way of the path chosen for Jem. She loves dancing, and Jem is part of a troupe that performs at worship services and other functions. With the group's leader in a family way, Jem volunteers to choreograph a new piece for a Labor Day picnic, and the newfound freedom of expression has her enjoying the taking of center stage.

Mainly, though, Jem has been having and acting upon "impure" thoughts in bed at night and in the shower. Some of that is just natural—but wicked within this belief system. More specifically, some of it is that Jem develops an infatuation with Owen (Lewis Pullman), who has just returned from missionary work. He's the church's youth pastor, the elder son of the pastor, and a married man. They start spending more time together, and Owen eventually shows that the attraction is quite mutual.

So much of this story becomes about the affair between Jem and Owen that Parmet loses track of the specifics of this community, as well as the bigger ideas of how it intentionally suppresses any sense of the individual (The subplot involving the father's past raises more questions than connections to the daughter's story). Indeed, any sense of Jem as a character beyond her feelings for this man start to become irrelevant. That last part, of course, is somewhat understandable, since this relationship likely is only the first notion Jem has had of something outside the lifestyle she has always had. It would be overwhelming for her, to be sure, and Parmet does balance the notion of Jem seeing Owen through the lens of first love and the reality that this older man is almost certainly using her for reasons that have little to do with actual love.

Such a thinly drawn and barely developed relationship, though, never quite fits into the story's bigger thematic scheme, which is about how the ways of this community stifle people—and Jem in particular—from having any purpose that isn't defined by those beliefs. Because the romance clearly isn't some pairing of equal partners or two people who see through this lifestyle, the relationship never feels as if it represents freedom. Indeed, it's essentially a different type of oppression for Jem. That is eventually an element of the point of this story, of course, although it takes so long for Parmet to present the character in a way that isn't defined by her circumstances that the movie ends just as the moment arrives.

Scanlen is quite good here, especially in the way she fills in the emotional and psychological evolution of the character, as well as the early prison for those traits in which Jem finds herself. That's more than the screenplay for The Starling Girl does, as the movie paints in broad and sometimes counterproductive strokes that don't quite add up to a convincing picture.

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