Bad but entertaining, 'Miller's Girl,' starring Jenna Ortega, is pure unintentional camp
Katie WalshJan. 26, 2024
Its been a long time since weve had a worthy entry in
to
the Completely Bonkers Cinematic Canon, which makes Jade Halley Bartletts Millers Girl a real treat. The most important quality that a Completely Bonkers film must have is a lack of self-awareness first and foremost, it cannot wink or nudge at the audience in order to say,
h H
ey, see what Im doing here? It must take itself utterly seriously
,
and that is what Millers Girl does so well, despite being completely divorced from any kind of recognizable reality.
The
Millers
G g
irl
in question is Cairo Sweet, played by Jenna Ortega in a riff on her Wednesday character (she delivers her lines in a deadpan staccato). She lives in an antebellum mansion in rural Tennessee surrounded by books many of them kept in antique birdcages for some reason and no parents.
; t T
heyre powerful lawyers who constantly travel the globe for work. Cairo describes herself in voice
–
over as lonely and unremarkable; her only hope is that she will soon meet a writer, by which she means she will attend high school.
The title Millers Girl has a double meaning: Cairos English teacher, the aforementioned writer, is named Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman).
, and a A
lso
, Cairo’sbecause shes
a fan of the notoriously banned novelist Henry Miller she brings a copy of his erotic novel Under the Roofs of Paris to the first day of class, along with a copy of Jonathans
(
unsuccessful
)
collection of romantic short stories, Apostrophes and Ampersands.
In this public high school there appear to be all of two teachers Mr. Miller and Coach Fillmore (Bashir Salahuddin) and two students
,
Cairo and her flirty, petulant best friend Winnie (Gideon Adlon), whose catchphrase is hungy. The girls devise a plan to seduce their teachers, mostly because Winnie has got it bad for Coach Fillmore, and because Cairo needs a topic for her college admissions essay about her greatest accomplishment. Please do not attempt to follow the logic of this wacky screenplay.
In addition to questionable character and story beats, Bartlett makes some odd directorial choices in terms of where she places the camera for certain significant moments. But Millers Girl has a delirious style in terms of its production design by Cheyenne Ford: Jonathan teaches in a dim room lined with Persian rugs; Cairos ancestral home is filled with taxidermy and tea cups and old rotary phones.
But its most notable aesthetic trait is its script (also written by Bartlett), which brings
a
new meaning to the phrase tortured prose. Theres the portentously over-the-top narration, and then theres the rapid-fire dialogue that makes Gilmore Girls look graceful. At one point, Jonathan calls Cairo a genius because she can capably use the word vituperation in a sentence. Its essentially Thesaurus: The Movie.
The locus of sexuality in Millers Girl resides entirely in words its how Jonathan and his wife, the workaholic Beatrice (Dagmara Dominczyk)
,
seduce each other
and its how his inappropriate flirtation with Cairo careens off the rails. He gives her a special midterm assignment to write in the style of her favorite author and she chooses Henry Miller, ultimately turning in an erotic essay so filthy it results in a messy climax that proves hard to clean up.
Theres a certain verve to Bartletts style
its
, which is
certainly
bold even if the plot turns make no sense and the character development is nil. Everyone seems to be having a fun time with the wild Southern Gothic tone, especially Dominczyk,
who is
in full Blanche DuBois mode as Beatrice, only ever clad in a bra and satin robe, constantly surrounded by stacks of paper and bottles of booze. Both Beatrice and Cairo take a real pleasure in verbally teasing, torturing and emasculating Jonathan, whom Cairo calls a madman
,
even though he just seems horny and hen-pecked.
Some might see Millers Girl as a
#MeToo
story about relationships with uneven power dynamics
,
but it plays more like a throwback 80s or 90s erotic thriller
like such as
Poison Ivy or Wild Things
but
with a literary bent. The movie
is is pure unintentional camp,
strik
esing
that wild, so-bad-its-entertaining chord vigorously. I cant recommend Millers Girl but I also cant recommend it enough.
Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.