Miller’s Girl
An English teacher in the Deep South is enraptured by the precocity – and talent – of a female student in Jade Halley Bartlett’s taut, eloquent debut.
Minding their language: Martin Freeman and Jenna Ortega.
Photo by Zac Popik, Image courtesy of Lionsgate UK
It’s a clever title. It at once summons up images of ripe romantic fiction, Philippa Gregory maybe, or perhaps Henry James, or even Vladimir Nabokov. And yet the film is all so perfectly poised, from its daring silences to the heart-breaking closing song from Janis Ian, ‘At Seventeen’: “I learned the truth at seventeen/That love was meant for beauty queens.” Miller’s Girl is, at heart, a love story. A love for literature, for intellectual improvement, for validation. It’s also about dead-ends, of vanquished dreams and disappointment, but also of hope for maybe something better. It marks the directorial debut of Jade Halley Bartlett, a former actress turned-writer, and it is a gilt-edged calling card.
Miller’s Girl begins brilliantly and one fears it can but peter out or turn into something gratuitous or even ludicrous. But the film holds its ground and glides to its conclusion with a maturity and deftness that catches the breath. Jenna Ortega, of Wednesday Addams fame, plays our narrator Cairo Sweet, who, while striding to school in her indecently short skirt, tells us that “literature is my solace in the solitude…”, that she “is languishing in the wilds of Nowhere, Tennessee,” interred in “this tomb of a house left to me by my brilliant and selfish parents. They’re not dead, though they pretend I am.” Well, that sets the scene.
Cairo Sweet is not only too wise for her britches but has read Finnegans Wake of her own volition. Teenage girls in backwater Tennessee just don’t do that. English teacher Jonathan Miller is impressed, and even more so when he discovers Cairo has read his own collection of short stories, Apostrophes & Ampersands. Here, one suspects the film is sending itself up: a protagonist called Cairo Sweet? A book-within-a-movie called Apostrophes & Ampersands? Surely not. But just as Cairo and Jonathan are playing their own interior game, so Jade Halley Bartlett flirts with the vanity of her audience. We are expected to know her literary allusions: James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Horace Mann and particularly Henry Miller (just wait and see).
Our other protagonist is Jonathan Miller, whose name is as apt as the film title that frames him. ‘Jonathan’ sums up perfectly his comfortable, approachable, middle-class origins. Miller is, of course, the surname of a provocative writer not approved to be taught in American classrooms. And Jonathan Miller is also the name of the Cambridge-educated author, professor and public intellectual who died just five years ago. No relation, of course. This Jonathan (Martin Freeman) is a man who is “over-reaching without ambition – is he not brave enough to do better?”
Here, words are everything and even Cairo’s wise-beyond-her-years bestie says things like, “I’m in my luteal phase” (she would know), while Cairo bats around words like “aphotic” and “vituperation.” In an inappropriately come-hither courtship in which Jonathan and Cairo memorise each other’s written works (this is early on), the former confesses to having an eidetic memory. Then there is Jonathan’s wife, Beatrice (Dagmara Domińczyk), a libidinous and alcoholic author who scoffs, “vocabulary doesn’t make you a writer anymore than math makes you a rocket scientist.” But Cairo not only knows her words, she knows the power she has over the opposite sex (and her own, for that matter).
The oddball pairing of Martin Freeman and Jenna Ortega might not spell anything as deliciously eloquent and perverse as this engaging curio, but Bartlett’s writing sucks one in with magnetic assurance. This is hardly unfamiliar material (mid-life crisis, writer’s block, teenage muse), but Bartlett never oversteps the mark into melodrama, never gives away too much – yet her film still has the power to shock. Martin Freeman pops up in the most unlikely of places, and here he manages to make his “clever and carelessly attractive” Southern teacher a rounded, empathetic and believable figure. And Ortega, while less convincing, is appropriately coquettish, appropriately calculating, the false halo framing her head in the final shot another of the film’s ingenious visual tricks.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Martin Freeman, Jenna Ortega, Dagmara Domińczyk, Bashir Salahuddin, Gideon Adlon, Christine Adams, Augustine Hargrave.
Dir Jade Halley Bartlett, Pro Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, James Weaver, Josh Fagen and Mary-Margaret Kunze, Screenplay Jade Halley Bartlett, Ph Daniel Brothers, Pro Des Cheyenne Ford, Ed Vanara Taing, Music Elyssa Samsel, Costumes Lauren Bott, Sound David Barber.
Good Universe/Point Grey Pictures-Lionsgate UK/Amazon Prime.
93 mins. USA. 2023. US Rel: 26 January 2024. UK Rel: 19 February 2024. Cert. 15.
