Synopsis
In the first of five interconnected stories, Arden (Toni Collette) finds the body of a dead girl in the abandoned orchard near her California home. Arden lives with her verbally abusive mother (Piper Laurie) who criticizes her daughter for bringing the police in. A grocery store clerk (Giovanni Ribisi) obsessed with serial killers asks Arden on a date. Desperate to get away from her dismal home life, she accepts.

Leah (Rose Byrne) is a grad student medical examiner whose sister has been missing for 20 years. Her mother (Mary Steenburgen) still holds out hope she’ll turn up, but Leah becomes convinced the dead girl is her missing sister. She comes out of her shell to attend a party with a classmate (James Franco) who has a crush on her. When the corpse is revealed not to be her sister, Leah sinks back into clinical depression.

A neglected wife (Mary Beth Hurt) discovers something in the storage facility where she works that leads her to believe her husband (Nick Searcy) had something to do with the dead girl. The victim’s mother (Marcia Gay Harden) arrives in L.A. and meets her runaway daughter’s strung out roommate (Kerry Washington). Finally, we meet the dead girl, a prostitute named Krista (Brittany Murphy) in the last 24 hours of her life.

Production history 
After completing her debut as a screenwriter and director with Blue Car, Karen Moncrieff found herself working on script assignments that didn’t interest her much. Her husband - producer Eric Karten - encouraged her to write something she cared about. Moncrieff had spent a month in a Los Angeles courtroom as a juror in a murder trial. The victim was a prostitute, and Moncrieff heard intimate details in the lives of people she ordinarily wouldn’t have come into contact with.

With testimony from each witness, a picture began to form of who the murdered woman had been. Once her civil service was finished, Moncrieff spent a month sketching an outline for a movie that followed the same pattern. Within two more months, she had expanded her outline into a screenplay. She met with Henry Winterstern, CEO of First Look Studios. Winterstern loved the script, and with Lakeshore Entertainment producing and financing, Moncrieff was given $4 million to make the film.

Once Toni Collette committed, the rest of the cast fell into place. Moncrieff was pregnant at the time, but after a two month break to give birth, was back at work. Three months of pre-production and a 25-day shooting scheduled commenced. Released December 2006, The Dead Girl went unseen by audiences, though critical reaction was strongly positive, with some reviewers comparing Moncrieff’s work to John Sayles.

Opinion 
Other than a title that didn’t help market it, the major weakness of Moncrieff’s sophomore effort is how oppressively serious she keeps the tone. This is a meditation on death - physical, spiritual, emotional - shot in washed out colors that give the film the feeling of a funeral. The Dead Girl is well cast and ambitious, but even though I respect the craft that went into the film, I didn’t enjoy it and can’t exactly recommend it.

Like most films that tackle multiple storylines, certain parts work much better than others. The Toni Collette segment is a disjointed, avant garde mess that pretty much derails the movie. The Rose Byrne/James Franco segment has more clarity, and is helped by the tremendous chemistry the two actors have together. I felt the same way about the Marcia Gay Harden/Kerry Washington segment.

Which brings me to the actor playing the dead girl’s boyfriend. Josh Brolin is being toasted for his work in Planet Terror, American Gangster and No Country For Old Men in 2007, and gives every indication here what kind of sublime acting year he’d have. The strength Brolin is able to exude with his mere presence continues to impress me. Moncrieff’s passion and intelligence does as well, but for her next film, I’d really like to see her lighten up a bit.

Nick Schager at Lessons of Darkness writes, “All self-contained vignettes, the various tales amount to little on their own and fail to resonate outside of their narrow narrative confines, Moncrieff’s strategy of generating mystery by revealing bits and pieces of the titular victim’s identity quickly undone by the clumsiness of most of her scenarios.” He gives The Dead Girl a C-

“The Dead Girl offers absolutely nothing new to… anything. It’s a useless film … a bunch of Oprah episodes strung together, which might be fine if there were some artistry or competence involved,” writes Andrew Wickliffe at The Stop Button. He gives it zero stars.

Frank Showaiter at Frank’s Movie Log writes, “None of the characters is likable and, because the film is broken into five different stories, none have any real arc and so the film has no real payoff. While this may have been cathartic for the filmmaker, as a viewer it’s almost masochistic.” He gives The Dead Girl a D.

© Joe Valdez