Beautiful Girl is currently available for sale or rent from Amazon Instant, Vudu, or iTunes.
Allow me to start this review by making the following observation: Beautiful Girl is a movie about the porn industry. And let us continue by answering the inevitable follow-up question: No, there’s not much sex or nudity at all, so you can all put your boners away right now.
(By the way, I’m using the word ‘boners’ as a unisex term. I’m well aware that women can enjoy porn too. So if you were already planning a strictly worded writing campaign to enlighten me, please don’t bother.)
Here’s the thing about Beautiful Girl: I would have liked it way better if it hadn’t been what it ended up being. Because at the end of the day, it’s just another story about how fucked up porn stars are. Which is more or less the same story that everybody in Hollywood wants to tell about porn.
So despite some really good performances, and an admirably dark sense of humor, it all ends more or less how all of these stories end, and… well, been there, done that.
Brendan Sexton III is our hero William, a dopey looking mechanic who has the good luck of fixing the car of Odessa (Diora Baird), a famous and popular porn star. The two fall in love over the course of about an hour, and William basically spends the whole rest of the movie learning what we knew from the beginning: there’s no way in the world this shit is going to work out. Meanwhile, there’s a (wildly undercooked) subplot about an ambitious director (Matthew Gray Gubler) that convinces Odessa to bankroll his mainstream indie comedy (which, from his description, sounds just like half the shit I review around here that nobody even wants to read about in the first place. So maybe don’t get all excited about your big break yet, kiddo…)
If there’s a saving grace to the movie, it’s that the performances are really quite good, there’s a sense of humor to the thing, and that the film takes a thankfully pragmatic approach to the business of porn, even if in the end they reach the same dispiriting conclusions that every other movie about porn does.
Attention must be paid in particular to Diora Baird, who shines in a very tricky role. In fact the biggest compliment I can send in her direction is that her performance reminded me of nothing less than Jude Law as Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr. Ripley.
(Bear with me here, people)
Her Odessa is such a hurricane of charisma and likability that you completely understand how easy it would be to fall in love with her and be swept away by her; and when she withdraws her affections, you feel the absence (Even though unlike poor, dumb-assed William, you see it coming from miles away).
But apart from the sheer charisma on display, she also sells the conflicts and traumas that she’s asked to play when the movie goes darker. It’s a complex, nuanced performance and somebody needs to bring her up to the Hollywood big leagues immediately.
Nobody quite approaches the heights of Baird’s performance, but to be fair, nobody is asked to. The next trickiest role is Angry Jack, Odessa’s bodyguard. A musclebound ex-con running around dressed as a Native American and just primed to explode, Jack is a live wire somewhere between incredibly goofy and deeply, deeply scary.
It wasn’t until I reached the end credits that I found out Angry Jack was played by the films writer/director Stevie Long, and in retrospect, it makes perfect sense.
It’s a showy role, and I would never begrudge a writer/director giving himself a plum role in his own production. And he acquits himself well enough (his garbled, inarticulate attempts to answer a simple question is a thing of beauty). But he’s also a little more cartoony and over-the-top than the movie seems to be going for a lot of the time, and it throws the tone off-balance in some interesting, but potentially counter-productive ways; I wanted more of his tone and less of the real world stuff they kept coming back to.
I’d also take a moment to sing the praises of Will Sasso, who takes what could be a typical predatory pimp/business manager role and invests it with humor, humanity, and a certain unexpected practicality.
So the acting, by and large, is pretty good, certainly way better than you usually find in movies like this. And whenever they’re just hanging out, it’s a hell of a lot of fun to watch. But whenever the trajectory starts trending down towards tragedy, my eyes glaze over.
There’s just no way to get around it; if this is the story you’re trying to tell, you are never in a million years going to tell it better than Boogie Nights. And if you’ll recall, I don’t even like Boogie Nights that much.
Not that I have much skin in the game, so to speak, but I’m still waiting for the movie about porn that doesn’t resort to unhappy endings to make… well, whatever point this movie is trying to make.
After all, I think that if there’s one thing we know about porn, it’s that they’re ALL ABOUT happy endings…
*drops mic, walks offstage like a boss*