The Dead Girl

In the opening scene of last year’s Oscar-winner for Best Picture, a little film named Crash, detective Graham Waters approaches the scene of a crime. “What do you got?” he asks a nearby detective, who in turn simply replies, “Dead kid.” Sure enough, a bloodied body is found lying within the blades of grass on the side of the road. This isolated corpse will not only assist in tying the film’s half-a-dozen storylines together, but also act as a symbolic representative of the filmmaker’s intended social commentary. The early moments of The Dead Girl suggest that director Karen Moncrieff has blatantly borrowed Crash’s plot structure by opening with a character finding the mutilated corpse of a girl in a grassy field no less. While the “dead kid” in Crash symbolized the cost of racial prejudice, among other things, the “dead girl” here seems to represent all women ever to be preyed upon, exploited, and mutilated by an unsettlingly indifferent society.

This is the sophomore directorial effort from Moncrieff, whose feature debut was 2002’s Blue Car, which deftly studied the destructive relationship formed between a young girl and her lustful English teacher. That film brought delicate observation to a plot ripe for sensationalism, and the result was a quietly affecting drama as believable as it was deeply disturbing. With Dead Girl, Moncrieff seems to be aiming more for the jugular vein, by utilizing the now-commonplace mosaic of intertwining lives – most recently used by Best Picture nominee Babel – played by a cast of all-stars to bring her societal outrage to the mass-market. Yet as Moncrieff’s ambitions grow, the subtlety she displayed in her first film starts to dissipate. Consisting of five vignettes which focus on women personally affected by the victim’s death, the film’s thematic intent becomes redundant and at times even preachy. Thank god Moncrieff found a cast so exemplary it just manages to pull the whole thing off.

The first segment would have forged into broadly contrived territory if it weren’t for the aching vulnerability Toni Collette brings to the role of Arden, a young woman practically beaten into submission by her invalid mommy dearest. She’s played laughably by Piper Laurie, delivering the exact same performance she gave as the religious zealot of a mother in Carrie (1976), which worked for that film’s dark satire, but not within this film’s uncompromisingly bleak realism. This entire segment could’ve turned into a low-rent sequel to Carrie, had the titular girl not developed telekinesis, and grew up to be equally miserable and sheltered–hell, Arden even resembles an adult Carrie–yet Collette reigns in a formidable humanity that is the sequence’s sole source of credibility. She discovers the girl’s gory corpse, leading to the second chapter where forensics student Leah–played by Rose Byrne–thinks that the girl’s identity could be that of her long-lost sister, a fact her mother–an overacting Mary Steenburgen–refuses to accept. Both of these vignettes focus on women so damaged by society that their lives are stuck in limbo, while their salvation may lie in the newfound openness of a budding relationship.

The last three sections are unquestionably stronger. Mary Beth Hurt, an actress who has perfected playing women brimming with discontent ever since Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978), is fiercely memorable as Ruth, an aging housewife willing to preserve her marriage to a deadbeat husband–no matter how unhappy…or dangerous…it may prove to be. Next up is Marcia Gay Harden, who was so devastating in last year’s American Gun, and here plays the similar role of a mother struggling to make up for her failings as a parent, by picking up the pieces of her deceased child’s life. Harden’s scenes with her child’s roommate, played exquisitely by Kerry Washington, are the film’s most dramatically satisfying moments. Then comes a final act that exemplifies all the film’s strengths and weaknesses, as it follows the titular dead girl–an abused daughter turned prostitute - through her final hours of life. She’s played by Brittany Murphy, in a performance so much more vibrant than the majority of the film that one wishes she were allowed more screen time.

In the end, Murphy’s segment doesn’t add or detract from the previous scenes. While this allows each scene to stand on its own, it makes the overall enterprise feel like a decided letdown. If Murphy’s final hours were interspersed between the dissimilar vignettes–while eliminating the more excessive moments, like Byrne’s speechifying and Laurie’s hysterics–the film would have had a connecting thread to pull the audience through. As it stands, The Dead Girl is only intermittently absorbing. It doesn’t hold a candle to masterful ensemble dramas like Nine Lives (2005) and Thirteen Conversations about One Thing (2001), and if it does finally emerge as a moderate success, it’s largely due to the great work from Collette, Hurt, Harden, Washington, and Murphy. Yet the empathy Moncrieff feels for her female victims, as well as her anger at a world aiming its violent tendencies at them, is never in doubt. Murphy simply wants to live a peaceful life with her lover, where there’s nothing but “trees and sky.” Ironic that the last thing she ever saw, from her view in the bloodstained field, was the leering branches of trees and a limitless sky.

Rating: *** (out of *****)