So I’m having a movie watching weekend, and I had seen one too many strange, slow moving independent films, such as ‘Dreamland’, ‘The Chumscrubber’, and ‘Half Nelson’.  Not that those movies were bad, and with the exception of my revulsion to ‘The Chumscrubber’, based more on it’s content and not it’s worth as a cinematic art, they were quite good.  But as director Karen Moncrief’s independent film ‘The Dead Girl’ slowly opened to its credits, I was about independent movied out.  I was almost tempted to leave the theater and go home and watch ‘Mission Impossible III’ or ‘Commando’ just give myself a break from the heaviness of it all.  Thank goodness I didn’t because though it’s early in 2007, ‘The Dead Girl’ is the best movie I’ve seen all year.

‘The Dead Girl’ is essentially a series of five intertwined short films surrounding the dead body of a murdered girl found in an empty field.  The first of which concerns Arden (Toni Collette) who is a bit of an odd, enclosed, and somewhat emotionally disturbed woman who actually finds the dead girls body.  She tells the police, much to the dismay of her verbally abusive mother, Piper Laurie, who as we know, has some experience playing bad moms (Carrie, 1976).  This gives Arden a bit of celebrity and she also gets the attention of grocery store bag boy, and serial killer enthusiast Rudy (Giovanni Ribisi) who asks her out on a date.  This was one strange date, and as to what happens on this date and what this means I’ll have to let those smarter and more in tune with women than I figure that one out. 

The rest of the vignettes involve a young medical examiner in training (Rose Byrne) who is convinced the dead girl is her sister who has been missing for fifteen years.  So

buoyed she is that her family can finally relinquish the prison she feels her mother has made for their family, she feels she can finally move on with her life, until…

Mary Beth Hurt is Ruth, a woman in a long loveless marriage, with a husband she hates and who hates her it would seem.  It would also appear as if her husband murdered the dead girl, among others.  Finally feeling empowered in the relationship, I assume, Ruth proceeds into actions which seriously cause into question her sanity.

Marcia Gay Harden is Melora, the mother of the dead girl, now in L.A. via Podunk Washington to identify the body and answer questions.  She finds her last known address and finds out her daughter, who ran away 10 years prior has been a drug-using prostitute who ran from home to escape sexual abuse from her stepfather.  Melora learns other disturbing things from her daughter’s prostitute roommate Rosetta (Kerri Washington) including the fact that Melora has a three-year-old granddaughter.  Now Melora gets a chance for a do-over, and the chance to fix what she screwed up on so royally with her own daughter.

Finally we meet Kristin, the dead girl (Brittany Murphy – seriously, who else are they gonna get to play a strung out crack whore) who we learn is a spunky kid, with a good heart and a love of her daughter who seriously can’t catch a break.  Seriously.  

‘The Dead Girl’ starts out slowly but each story builds upon the one before it weaving its little web and trapping you within it.  By the time we get to Kristin, the dead girl, we’re totally captivated by its narrative, awaiting an outcome that we already know is inevitable.  Some of the characters may behave in ways which confuse us, but is it truly necessary to understand the actions of everything and everyone?  Maybe in a perfect world, but that’s fairly unreasonable.  I appreciate the ambiguity to some of the characterizations as opposed to those cut in stone.

Now as men, we didn’t come off smelling too good in this one.  We’re sexually deviant, pussy chasing, whore mongering, spineless, serial killing, prostitute abusing, and prostitute procuring monsters.  Moncrief should have stuck a Catholic Priest in this thing and she could have pretty much closed the book on Man as being a little less than human.  But it is a vantage point that we don’t see too often, which is another reason to go ahead and load up ‘Commando’ to see some male realism!

All jokes aside, ‘The Dead Girl’ is a great, great film and I’m interested to see what Ms Moncrief comes up with for her next project.  If she follows the path of most directors who get a little pub for their excellent independent project, I will looking for an insanely bad romantic comedy from the woman starring Matthew McConaghey sometime in late 2008.