Premise: A teen girl in a fundamentalist Christian community has an affair with her youth pastor.
I was worried going into this movie. The film is set it Kentucky. I'm from Kentucky. More specifically, the film is set in a remote rural community in Kentucky. I'm from Louisville. But in both cases, people just hear Kentucky. Frankly, I've had my fill of unnuanced depictions of how backwards and backwoods Kentucky is. It's similar to how Indiana people must feel about every show about boring Midwest life getting set in Indiana. Look, I'm not even saying they are unfair depictions of large portions of Kentucky. The bar is just set higher now for what I'm in the mood to put up with.
It goes back to a point I made after watching Junebug. Most films and shows that get made do so from a few production hubs - Los Angeles, New York City, Atlanta, maybe Austin, Vancouver, and a few others. The people who populate the film industry either grew up in it or moved from the middle of the country to, most likely, Los Angeles. To them, anything that isn't NY or LA is Mayberry. So, it gets very hard to find takes in film of places outside of those major hubs with any thoughtfulness or at least a lack of judgment.
So, with all those unfair concerns to bring to a little Sundance movie, I decided to watch The Starling Girl. After all, Eliza Scanlen has always been good in stuff.
In the nicest way possible, I'll say The Starling Girl is pretty average. I've seen every level of this movie before. An Education and The Tale did underage affairs. Saved and Yes God Yes covered sexual awakening in a small religious community. The Starling Girl doesn't carve out any space I haven't seen before. So, I had to focus on how well it was doing this familiar thing.
In that respect, it was well done. The cast is good. Since Sharp Objects, Eliza Scanlen has been specializing in a sort of innocent edge. I think it's a strong performance of someone realizing they don't fit in a place, despite their efforts. Most of the trouble she gets into in this movie stems from her chasing something she can't find in her normal life. Lewis Pullman as the much older youth pastor she falls for offers less, although that has more to do with the character than the performance. You see why Scanlen would be drawn to him, but there isn't much depth to him beyond that. As Scanlen's parents, Jimmi Simpson and Wrenn Schmidt bring much more lived-in performances than I expected. I really like how for them, this community is something they opted into. They lived a life before. That life took a toll on Simpson in particular. He made the conscious choice to build a family in this community, and like Scanlen, he struggles to conform to their standards. That is my favorite thing about this movie. While it doesn't endorse the world, it also isn't concerned with trying to tear it all down. It's a movie about not fitting in, not about making a value judgment and rebelling. I think that’s truer to life.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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