‘Miller’s Girl’
Jonathan Miller, a creative writing high school teacher (Martin Freeman, who played Bilbo in “The Hobbit”) works in rural Tennessee. He’s bored out of his skull.Though he’s a published author, he hasn’t written anything in years, and the question of the ultimate meaning of his life haunts him. His marriage to Beatrice (Dagmara Dominczyk) is on the rocks, as in, the ice that one puts in alcoholic drinks, which she drinks too much of so as to make his presence bearable.
Dreading having to face another class of insouciant, dumbed-down teens, when 18-year-old Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega) walks into his class—he perks up. Mostly because she’s whip-smart with a voracious appetite for reading and a serious writing talent.
No Parents
Cairo’s parents are off on one of their back-to-back globetrotting adventures, and they’ve left their nubile daughter, as they always do, to live alone in an antebellum mansion with much gothic atmosphere. Which serves to remind us of budding star Ms. Ortega’s recent turn as Wednesday Addams, in “Wednesday,” a Netflix series spin-off of the 1960s’ sitcom “The Addams Family.”In addition to walking back roads and through deep, dark, Red-Riding-Hood woods, clad in short shorts, Cairo’s got a highly hormonal bestie, Winnie Black (Gideon Adlon). Let the too-young-girls-fantasizing-about-forbidden-high-school-teachers dialogue begin.
Protégé
Sensing Cairo’s budding writing talent, Mr. Miller begins to give her special attention—a boundary-dissolving step that doesn’t go unnoticed by Winnie.As the teacher-student relationship morphs into private tutoring, Mr. Miller gives Cairo an assignment: Write a short story in the style of her favorite author. Naturally, she picks provocative author Henry James and writes an explicit tale of a male-teacher-on-female-student seduction.
Two Problems
Firstly, as a star-making vehicle for Ms. Ortega, “Miller’s Girl” works. Much like a younger Rosie Perez sans heavy Nuyorican (New York Puerto Rican) accent, Ms. Ortega is a current “It girl” with impressive acting chops and high star-wattage. She manages to make the longings of a literate student tempted by the pleasures of an older-man illicit relationship believable.That said, once Miller reads her writing as voice-over, intertwined with Cairo voice-over, it’s straight verbal porn, and I was immediately done. Especially because Bilbo was having way too much fun reading it. Which is all I’m going to say about that. I just, you know, draw the line at Hobbit porn.
Also, director-writer Jade Halley Bartlett’s background is as a playwright, and so while the theatricality of the dialogue probably reads well on the page, it comes off as too florid, flowery, and Algonquin Round Table-ish for a little teenage bad-girl movie.
Not that that’s not possible, if stylization is the intention, but this is not that movie. The one exception being Miller’s wife Beatrice, who’s served by the prose since she’s written as a kind of Virginia Woolf-type boozy harridan, hitting her husband repeatedly below the belt regarding his ineffectual writing career and manhood.
“Miller’s Girl” could have been a worthy story about the emotional complexities of the very real teacher-student dilemma faced by male high school teachers around the globe, but Ms. Bartlett ultimately sold her characters out by shaping the whole thing as a simple revenge tale peppered with cheap-thrill gimmickry like high school girl-on-girl make-out scenes and Hobbit porn.
Boris, the moral center of the story, depicts a morally upright (if nonstop jokey) grown man with a clear-cut understanding of right and wrong, who’s got no problem whatsoever discerning the boundary where right tips over into wrong, and taking immediate and decisive boundary-setting action. That’s the movie’s main takeaway, and it’s a good one.
