THE DEAD GIRL / Karen Moncrieff (2006)

December 18th, 2006 by Scott Marks

Brittany Murphy stars as THE DEAD GIRL (2006)

The Dead Girl (2006)

Directed by: Karen Moncrieff

Written by: Karen Moncrieff

Genres: Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Cast: Toni Collette, Piper Laurie, Don Smith, Michael Raysses, Earl Carroll, Dorothy Beatty, Eva Loseth, Giovanni Ribisi, Rose Byrne, Joanie Tomsky, James Franco, Christopher Allen Nelson, Mary Steenburgen, Bruce Davison, Kate Mulligan

Aspect Ratio: 1.85 : 1

Told in five outwardly unrelated segments of equal length, The Dead Girl examines how the murder of an insignificant crack whore affects a handful of psychologically broken women. It’s not a pretty picture.

As in her first feature Blue Car, writer/director Karen Moncrieff paints a finely observed portrait of the impact violent behavior has on women. While the killer turns out to be a man, this is not a film that uses male-bashing as an easy out. Much of the emotional battery stems from mothers who are either verbally abusive or emotionally oblivious.

The film plays out in a semi-achronological order. The first image we see is of Arden (Toni Colette), “The Stranger” who comes across the decomposing body, sound asleep in the overpowering arms of her invalid mother (Piper Laurie). A tortured, painfully shy momma’s girl, her discovery briefly thrusts Arden into the spotlight. People in the grocery store stop and point her out. Serial killer obsessed bagboy Rudy (Giovani Ribisi) goes so far as asking her on a date.

The recognition stops at home where mom blasts her daughter for reporting the crime. This time, Piper Laurie makes Carrie’s mother Margaret White seem like Ma Joad. A bedridden walrus with an odious Jackie Gleason-sized cackle, she is a non-stop torture machine. On screen for no more than five minutes, Ma Laurie shows you every reason to understand why Arden turned out the way she did.

Arden and Rudy do go out and she practically begs to be tied up and raped. We believe Rudy when he assures Arden that he will not hurt her. After years of living with her maniacal, dominating mother Arden is beyond hurt.

Leah (Rose Byrne) is “The Sister,” a forensics student working the county morgue. She studies death, yet is still unable to come to grips with her sister’s abduction fifteen years earlier. Her mother Beverly (Mary Steenburgen) selects a bus stop bench photo of her late daughter with the same attention to detail she would chosing wallpaper.

A birthmark on the dead girl’s hand convinces Leah that it’s her sister. Even the slightest clue causes Leah to briefly reenter life. She even agrees to date a fellow student (James Franco) who’s been pursuing her for three years.

Who is “The Wife?” Is she the dead girl’s mother? Ruth (Mary Beth Hurt) lives in a trailer with her husband Carl (Nick Searcy). They argue in their easy chairs, eyes glued to the TV set, never once looking at their partner. He goes out for drives that frequently last for days. Ruth wants nothing more than to be a passenger.

Ruth is so concerned with not taking the Lord’s name in vain that she’s blinded to the fact that her husband is a serial killer. An unexpected visit to a storage locker uncovers a bureau filled with souvenirs of Carl’s murderous jaunts.

While there is no evidence that Ruth has any children, she is easily the film’s ultimate mother figure. After discovering Carl’s secret life she still prepares and serves her little man his TV dinner. The shot of Ruth naked and walking away from the flames she set to destroy the evidence remains the film’s most haunting image.

Melora (Marcia Gay Harden) is “The Mother” who learns of her estranged daughter’s past from Rosetta (Kerry Wahsinton), the prostitute who worked with Krista (Brittany Murphy) at the time of her murder. The rush of backstory nearly fells Melora particularly when she discovers that Krista’s first sexual contact was at her father’s hands.

This segment houses the film’s only titter, and I had to dig for it. Krista’s daughter is named “Ashley Kutcher.” Ms. Murphy briefly dated Punk’d hunk Ashton during the filming of Just Married. Shortly after the coosome twosome split, Ms. Murphy told a Late Night audience, “I suppose the crux of (Ashton and Demi’s) relationship basically means to him that age doesn’t matter and to her that size doesn’t matter.” First a small penis, now a crack baby for a daughter. Let’s hope the unending abuse doesn’t cause Ashton to loop one end of his Kabbalah bracelet around his neck, the other over the shower curtain rod.

Bubbly to the point of being uncorked, there has always been something a tad bit unnerving about Brittany Murphy’s portrayal of brittle, yet overly-outgoing characters. Even in multiplex-filler like Uptown Girls there is that unending ebb of neurotic desperation; lightning in a bottle about to be devastated by an earthquake.

Her early characterizations can be easily summed up by the titles of two of her most successful film: Clueless and Drop Dead Gorgeous. A prolonged dark patch (Girl, Interrupted, Cherry Falls, Spun) brought about more complex roles. She miraculously survived an unhealthy string of studio comedies between 8 Mile and Sin City. God or bad, every second of prior screen time led to this explosive performance.

We never learn why Krista’s daughter lives apart from her. All that is important is that she turns three tomorrow and Krista needs a ride to Norwalk to deliver her present. Her boyfriend Tarlow (Josh Brolin) has a Poison poster hanging on his wall, an “Eat s*it and Die” tattoo on his upper arm, and only agrees to give her a ride in exchange for a free blowjob.

Even though she keeps her part of the bargain, the ride never materializes. Rosetta lies bloody in bed after catching a beating off her pimp. All else fails and Krista is forced to thumb a fatal ride.

Thankfully, Ms. Moncrieff spares us Chapter 6,”The Killer.” She found the impetus for this film while sitting on a month-long trial involving the death of a prostitute. “The tremendous waste of her life haunted me,” she wrote in a press statement.

Endless hours of MSNBC documentaries have transformed Krista’s type into a pathetic stock figure. Ms. Moncrieff recalled her time as a juror and fought not to go in the opposite direction by presenting “a sainted victim.” As she observed, “Both of these mental characterizations seemed to answer some need to avoid seeing this woman as a real person.”

If ever there wasn’t a Christmas release, it’s The Dead Girl. By her own admission, Karen Moncrieff makes dark movies because, “We live in a dark world, mostly with our heads down.” Her film’s hideous surfaces gradually reveal a brilliant depth of compassion and understanding. This is an amazingly powerful film, impossible to shake. Weeks later and a part of me is still inside this movie. If you really want to give yourself the gift of cinema this holiday season, buy a ticket for The Dead Girl.

[rating: 4)