Michael Moore’s incendiary anti-George W Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 was scheduled for release this week, but has now been put back to early next year. It is not entirely clear why this happened (it is said Moore needs the prints in the United States), but the upshot is that we are left with a pretty poor week for the movies. Hence we focus on an entirely dispensible US teen comedy, The Girl Next Door.
The story is simple. Matthew (Emile Hirsch) is a young man, on the verge of leaving high school, who notices a very attractive young woman staying in the house next door. They meet. Her name is Danielle. She is played by Elisha Cuthbert. The two young people bond. Matthew, who is something of a nerd, though nonetheless reasonably good-looking, is then informed by his fellow-nerd and porn enthusiast friend, Eli (Chris Marquette), that Danielle has been in a porn movie — and he, Eli, has the evidence to prove it.
Naturally, or not so naturally, Matthew freaks out. This provides the chief obstacle on the road to true love that is the formal necessity of all such romantic comedies, without which there is no story. Boy meets girl is not a story. Boy meets girl, loses girl, gets girl back — that is a story, and one that has been told a million times. And so it is for Matthew and Danielle.
Apart from the emotional and perhaps moral confusions that arise for Matthew and Danielle after he discovers her performing past, various other, more practical issues arise. They involve Danielle’s former manager (Timothy Olyphant) and a big-time porn producer with the odd name of Hugo Posh (James Remar) — the German clothing-maker must be most bemused.
On the level of deep content one might espy here some of the moral ambiguity that surrounds images of women in the star-mad, porn- guzzling and self-righteously Puritan US. The Girl Next Door can’t deal with any of this in a complex way, though, and simply sets the world of porn up against the world of familial suburbia, with a completely unconvincing gasp of “Shock! Horror!” in the direction of the former. It does hint, however, in its very storyline, that the two worlds interpenetrate and are, in some ways, reflections of one another.
Generally, the movie is fairly easy-going about the whole thing: the revelation that Danielle has been in a porn movie does not make Matthew reject her out of hand; instead, he revises (with a little help from his friends) his plans about getting her into bed. There is something going on here about good girls versus bad girls, with the ghost of some ancient moral system hovering in the background, but The Girl Next Door doesn’t go into it in any depth.
There are some funny moments, but not enough to keep the whole thing rolling for all of its duration. One has to accept the underlying belief that a giggly blonde chick is the apogee of millions of years of human evolution — she doesn’t even have to be a natural blonde. And one has to accept that the film’s most important narrative device is to start a new song on the soundtrack, even if it is barely a minute since the last song.
More than that, it’s hard to find anything to say about The Girl Next Door. To paraphrase one of the movie’s catchlines, the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.