
Miller’s Girl came and went like stormy weather, causing plenty of noise, drenching the world for a few hours and then leaving the night behind it: empty, cold, dark, and wet. The movie concerns an affair between a star student (Jenna Ortega) and her English teacher (Martin Freeman). What starts as gentle smiles and easy talk escalates to open flirtation, emotional intimacy, and kissing in the pouring rain. It’s a vivid and evocative work that punches with brass knuckles through the Lolita pages it’s playing with and sears with the strength and fresh agony of a soul laid bare. It’s one of the only times in the past year I felt like I was seeing something new, some assembly of shots and dialogue and moments and feelings that was completely unique and fully formed.
The film came out in the doldrum months at the beginning of 2024, from a visionary new voice, Jade Halley Bartlett. Few people saw it and even fewer liked it. Critics eviscerated it, naturally, because heaven forbid we turn age-old misogynistic tropes on their heads and heaven forbid we absorb ourselves in a story of bad decisions, carnality, and sensuality. Many decried it on the basis of being low-brow, bad taste, bad art. But these days, the bad taste seems to be the only stuff that tastes of anything. And besides, this movie actually deals with sex, and neither film nor its critics have had sex on the brain in a very long time.
Miller’s Girl And “Good Taste”
Do not consult critics for a movie like Miller’s Girl. What right do a bunch of mid-life-crisis to pensioner-age white dudes who studied writing, journalism, English, or god forbid, filmmaking, in school and coasted by on a wave of trust funds, who live in New York City and hide behind computers, dictionaries open to look for florid words to describe the plight of minorities and young women and toxic masculinity, people and concepts that always remain purely conceptual to them — what right do these people have to dictate the limits of art, the definitions of sexuality, and the qualifications that befit “good taste”?
source: Lionsgate
Miller’s Girl is a good goddamn movie, one that’s far ahead of the usual #MeToo film by virtue of not even engaging in the same conversation. Forget matters of consent, of right and wrong. Those issues might have been novel when The New Yorker published Cat Person what seems like eons ago, but does that still have the power to shock us? Given that Cat Person is now a film and that virtually nobody has seen it — I don’t even know if it’s supposed to be good or not — I think that we’ve moved on from the mere suggestion that the #MeToo movement can handle morally grey areas.
Miller’s Girl doesn’t care about #MeToo, though some critics have suggested that the film exists on the same wavelength as movies like She Said, The Assistant, and Women Talking. In its cold, merciless, dryly witty execution, the film is far more like Tár, but even Tár doesn’t try to break the mold; rather, it revs up its motorcycle and drive donuts along the walls of the mold. Tár is an exercise in presenting every possible corner of a #MeToo narrative, leaving the whole issue spotless when it’s done, like that riddle about a man who vacuums a spherical home. Miller’s Girl, on the other hand, is a movie about sex and control that makes Challengers look as harmless and virgin as a baby squirrel, a movie about the complexity of both wanting to love and destroy, about being young and sexy and wanting to ruin the lives of the people who hold you back. The sheer vitriol leveled at this film by critics is embarrassing on a level nigh unfathomable to me, except thanks to a website named after the stuff that medieval peasants throw at tortured prisoners, we have the exact statistics to show what percentage of them don’t believe Miller’s Girl is worth the bytes it’s stored on.
source: Lionsgate
The reason the film has incensed so many insecure boys, I think, is multifaceted — one must consider the total and complete lack of agency or seriousness afforded to teenage girls in Western culture, the ridicule facing any young woman who dares to display any sign of sexual maturity, and the erroneous idea that a work of art cannot be about a theme without delivering a carefully researched, double-spaced book report about that theme.
A Southern Gothic Love Affair
I can sit here and write for you the ways in which I believe Miller’s Girl succeeds as a work of art, the myriad strong filmmaking choices that communicate and support the film’s characters, depth, and themes. The scene where Martin Freeman’s Miller argues with his wife (Dagmara Domińczyk), shot from outside looking in, each character photographed with a wooden window pane splitting the space on-screen between them, exemplifies their inability to see eye to eye. The rich intertextuality of the “sexy student” trope informs Jenna Ortega’s strut, knee-high boots, and schoolgirl attire. The Southern Gothic setting and style positions the film like an ironic glob of spit aimed at William Faulkner’s corpse while also indicating that Ortega’s character, the ludicrously named Cairo Sweet, is somehow preternaturally gifted in writing, as though centuries of American Southern Gothic fiction seeped into a person’s womb and created Cairo like a Gen Alpha Immaculate Conception. The film frames every dialogue scene, suspenseful and casual alike, as a chamber drama, until it finally sheds its veneer for a go-for-broke ridiculous and campy kiss scene in the pouring rain, and it totally works because it feels organic and earned and yet also like the world is seconds away from exploding.
source: Lionsgate
The film is loaded with perfect imagery that tells the story as well as the script can, but that’s not really why you’re here. That’s not what I’m here for, either. Because though I think the film is technically excellent, I also think that the ways that Miller’s Girl worked for me, won me over, and moved me are not due to the technical execution. This is art that speaks to primal things, repressed things, and that’s the kind of art that most people, even art critics, have trouble speaking about. When you build an entire artistic model on lionizing white male ego and celebrating fine tastes and denigrating the vulgar and the feminine, a work of art that is both feminine and vulgar is naturally going to repel like a lemon in the mouth of a child.
Conclusion
Miller’s Girl is a fable. It’s a story about a goat that conquers a wolf, but also about how good it feels to rest your woollen head in the open charcoal maw. Offering oneself to the mouth of a hungry animal isn’t about death; in Miller’s Girl, it’s about control and the small sadistic glees that a girl can steal for herself in a place that only cares about her wool, her milk, and her meat. This is a glorious, enchanting, intense, sensual piece of art, one that stretches Ortega’s range as a performer and capitalizes on the fucked-up sexualized infantilization she’s experienced. It leans on Freeman’s skills to convey affability but also danger — his Mr. Miller is a creature of sexual urges and depravity himself who thinks that he’s above that sort of thing. The performance requires Freeman to ignore every single instinct and lean back into a darkness, falling. His rapid fall from grace is the sandbag that Cairo Sweet is trying to ride to… what, exactly, is the question then. The central conflict of the plot is not will they/won’t they, it’s the mystery of what Cairo hopes to gain from this power play. We know what Mr. Miller wants from this. But this is the challenge of all provocative sexual art in a world that already has a hundred buzzwords and debate points at its fingertips to easily “cancel” and nullify artists and works it disagrees with: How can we continue to present evolved depictions of sexuality and the dynamics of sexual power?
Miller’s Girl is about that quest for power and understanding and the incredible thrill of stepping on someone’s head with your stiletto. Cairo destroys her own innocence and preys on her own fragility as much as, if not more than, Mr. Miller does — a destruction caused by what she thinks is love. And yet she still climbs the marble steps to meet him, and with tears in her eyes, she observes him sitting alone and miserable, broken, and we don’t know if she’s proud, miserable, or if she still wants to grab him and press her lips against his. Perhaps it’s all three. To paraphrase Faulkner, perhaps they were right putting love into films. Perhaps it can’t exist anywhere else.
Miller’s Girl is now streaming on Netflix.
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