[ad_1]
Perhaps nostalgia will bring people to Luckiest Girl Alive (Netflix, October 7), an adaptation of Jessica Knoll’s best-selling 2015 novel. That book, a dark psychological thriller about a well-kept woman’s secret torment, was a hallmark smash of the post-Gone Girl era, a time not even a decade ago when arch, twisty, vaguely feminist novels (often with “girl” in the title) were all the rage. It seems we’re mostly past that trend, but here is director Mike Barker’s 2015-set film (which was adapted by Knoll) to carry us back to it.
Or, I suppose, that was the intention. In execution, Luckiest Girl Alive just feels dated, an inert and strangely hurried film flickering like the ghost of the book’s heyday. A hash of discordant tones and stiff performances, Luckiest Girl Alive perhaps does one productive service: it reminds us that a lot of that post-Gone Girl stuff wasn’t terribly good.
Mila Kunis plays Ani Fanelli, a hard-charging Manhattanite who has shrewdly built the perfect life. Or, the perfect almost-life. She’s got a cool if brain-deadening job writing sex advice articles for a Cosmo-esque magazine, but the real goal, nearing on the horizon, is to follow her editor, LoLo (a steely Jennifer Beals), to the New York Times Magazine, where Ani will, presumably, write stuff of true importance. And she’s engaged to the rich, preppy-hot man of many an Upper East Sider’s dreams: Luke, a former college lacrosse player turned finance guy whose parents have an estate in Nantucket and who keeps himself and Ani in a sleek apartment in the city.
They’re not married yet, just as Ani hasn’t yet secured her true dream job. She’s in a liminal state of anticipation, waiting for the final two pieces of her life to snap into place so that she can know, once and for all, that she has escaped the horror, shame, and debasement of her past.
And what a gnarly past it is. As a scholarship student at a tony prep school, Ani (played by Chiara Aurelia in the film’s flashbacks) was sexually assaulted at a house party that was quickly swept under the rug by the school administration and by Ani’s flouncy, ill-tempered mother, Dina (Connie Britton). Ani then survived a school shooting, though she was later accused of being in on the attack by one of the victims, a popular bully (involved in Ani’s earlier trauma) who went on to become an anti-gun activist.
It’s been years since these twin nightmares, but as an adult Ani still rattles with anger so concentrated it’s become hallucinatory. (We can practically hear this literary device creaking in the air of the movie.) The mystery of the film is figuring out what exactly happened to Ani during both incidents, while the present-tense focuses on the drama of Ani trying to truly process and move on from her more than troubled adolescence.
None of this is handled carefully, or thoughtfully. Barker keeps the film moving at a bizarre clip, rushing toward reveals and psychological snaps and breakthroughs with no consistent idea of what the movie’s mood should be. There’s an offhandedness to the way Luckiest Girl Alive stages Ani’s ordeals that fatally minimizes its overall impact. It certainly doesn’t help that these dreadful adolescent scenes are intercut with the nearly satiric tone of the Kunis half of the film. Luckiest Girl Alive keeps telling us that we are watching a biting depiction of sublimated grief and rage, but the movie bounces along at such a weird pace that nothing can sink in or register as more than garish, tossed-off plot detail.
Forced to contend with the film’s erratic herking and jerking, Kunis can’t get a grip on her performance. She never reaches any deep or resonant notes; her Ani is all surface tension and occasional outbursts, a postcard for post-traumatic stress disorder rather than an embodiment of it. She gets no support from Barker, who doesn’t seem terribly interested in any of the intangible, emotional mechanics of the movie. He just wants to get from one scene to the next as quickly as possible, with a lingering pause for a brutal school-shooting sequence.
What works best is the simpler stuff. The film was actually shot in New York City and appears to have been approached with some eye toward aesthetic graces. The over-lit flatness of so many—practically all other?—Netflix B-thrillers is nowhere to be found in Luckiest Girl Alive. This is a sleek, expensive-looking movie—not as visually arresting as David Fincher’s Gone Girl, but far more considered than its forgettable peers. That’s the kind of throwback we should see more of: a return to the decades-gone tradition of smaller genre films made with style and finesse. Though a lot of those older movies also had pleasing texture and rhythm, a basic intelligence entirely lacking in Barker’s film. How lucky we were to have them.
[ad_2]
Source link