At one point during Miller’s Girl, the debut feature from writer-director Jade Halley Bartlett, a character remarks “If it’s not controversial, it’s not interesting” and while the line ostensibly refers to a short story that serves as a pivot point for the narrative, it could also easily be used as a critique of the entire overheated and underthought project. This is a film that clearly wants to come across as some kind of edgy provocation meant to send audiences out into the street arguing over its content but the whole thing is so tedious that if it does inspire any arguments between viewers, they will most likely be about whose bright idea it was to see it in the first place.
In it, Jenna Ortega plays Cairo Sweet, a brilliant 18-year-old high school student with grand literary ambitions and a deep desire to escape her little Tennessee hometown, where she apparently lives alone in a rambling and isolated mansion while her high-powered lawyer parents are constantly away. Outside of wild child best pal Winnie (Gideon Adlon), the only person she seems to connect with is teacher Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman), whose once-grand literary ambitions have resulted in one poorly-selling book, a rocky marriage to a more successful writer (Dagmara Dominczyk) and his half-hearted new role as an educator. Impressed with her vast knowledge (and flattered by the fact that she has actually read his book), he begins to serve as a mentor to her, even bringing her to a poetry reading outside of school, and gives her an assignment to write a story in the style of another author.
Unfortunately for him, she picks none other than Henry Miller as the author to emulate and although he warns her that Miller is not considered appropriate for a high school curriculum, he lets her go ahead. Perhaps inevitably, she turns in an especially salacious narrative involving an explicit sexual encounter between a teacher and his student. Recognizing that a line has been crossed, though not before giving the story (which basically sound like something from the reject pile for the letters column at Penthouse) his own personal passing grade (Spoiler Alert—ewww), he rejects both it and Cairo’s attentions but his inability to recognize that he crossed lines long before the story was turned in threatens to destroy his already meh existence.
The film, I think, is trying to explore notions of power dynamics and how they now play out in the #MeToo era, but the whole thing quickly devolves into little more than an uninspired mashup of David Mamet’s Oleanna and the first section of Todd Solondz’s Storytelling. For starters, neither one of the two central characters are particularly interesting—Cairo is little more than a Manic Pixie Nightmare Girl whose apparent determination to destroy everyone around her is never explored while Miller, despite the additional relationships he has with his wife and fellow teacher Boris (Bashir Salahuddin), comes across as little more than a mope. Another problem is that while Freeman and Ortega have both proven themselves to be strong actors in the past, neither one is especially impressive here and their on-screen chemistry—the basic element that could have given this tale the kind of queasy kick that it needed—is virtually nonexistent. In contrast to their borderline somnambulistic performances, Dominczyk plays to the rafters as Miller’s perpetually sodden and oversexed wife and while her turn is indeed pretty bad, she does manage to inject the film with the closest thing it has to life whenever she is on the screen.
To be fair, this might be the fault of Bartlett’s largely terrible screenplay—the dialogue makes nearly all the characters sound like a combination of Rooster Cogburn and a soap opera, the narrative contains so many loose ends and discarded subplots (including Winnie’s efforts to seduce Boris) that it feels at times as if whole chunks of the story were dropped at some point, and the erotic tension that the whole thing is meant to revolve around is more laughable than arousing. The fractured feel to the story makes such a mess of its internal rhythms that even though it is only about 90 minutes or so in length, it feels as if it is at least twice that length. When it finally does conclude, it ends on a note that I suspect was meant to be enigmatic but ends up as just one more bit of frustration for anyone who made it that far.
On paper, Miller’s Girl sounds like a potentially interesting tale that, in the right hands, could have said any number of things about power, consent and sexuality in contemporary society. In Bartlett’s hands, however, it just becomes an exercise in button-pushing that never comes together into anything of real interest. Much like its central characters, this is a film that, much like its two central characters, is never lacking in regards to its sense of self-importance but lacks the ability to back it up in any particularly interesting way.