Starting right off with the grisly discovery of a dead girl, apparently abducted, mutilated and dumped in a field of dead and dismembered fruit trees, ‘The Dead Girl’ tells the story of this ultimate heartbreak from the points of view of multiple friends and relatives and through stories with varied timelines.
There are five stories total and the stories start general and far-removed and gradually close in on the victim, like the close-up camera shot getting into the subject’s mind. The first stories deliver a general message of the consequences of man’s inhumanity to man while the last stories focus on the particular impacts of the dead girl’s (Brittany Murphy) life that led to her last days on earth.
The first story is about discovery of her body, the shock of which causes profound changes in Arden’s (Tony Collette) long-standing rotten relationship with her abusive mother (a brief but superlative performance by Piper Laurie). As a result of the reverberations of her discovery, Collette enters into a mysterious relationship with Rudy in which we are treated to another great, also too brief, performance by Giovanni Ribisi. Such is the story of this film, for better or for worse. It is too much a collection of brief, but excellent, performances by great supporting players. But whereas the recent AIDs triptych, 3 Needles, failed to pull its pieces together into a coherent whole, this quintet does it a lot better.
Next is a young forensics student (Rose Byrne) who is desperate for closure to the long past disappearance of her own sister. Her mother (Mary Steenburgen) is tottering on the brink of insanity over the event. The pressure is so great the student imagines the dead girl is her sister and the long-awaited answer to the torturous mystery of her sister’s disappearance.
Then we go to the husband and wife (Mary Beth Hurt) who operate a mini-warehouse lot on some faceless highway that America left behind. The husband protects a terrible secret, the full impact of which is only beginning to tell in the lines on the drawn face of his rejected wife.
Finally we are led to the story of the dead girl herself, in the last hours of her life as she ricochets like a pin ball from one violent episode to the next in trying to recover what is left of a shattered and traumatized life.
There will be few better examples of the use of multiple points of view to tell a story than one will see in this film. There are not five separate stories, but one story with fiver separate sets of effects on the respective players.
Director/writer Karen Moncrieff (‘Blue Car’) puts her heart and mind completely into this one as she crafts the five stories into a single focal point that joins them into one in the end.
‘The Dead Girl’ is a legitimate contribution to a heightened awareness of both the causes and effects of runaway children and their abduction and abuse. The telling of the tale in five parts is an unusual approach that adds depth and dynamics to the film by the combined use of flashbacks and stories within stories.
The coldly neutral titles of each part (“The Stranger”...) add a coldness to the overall film that underscores the barren emotional landscape of the perp and the blankness of the life of the runaway and other traumatized and abused characters in the story. In the end, both the perps and the abused lose everything they have.
Excellent performances from all of the cast above plus Nick Searcy and Kerry Washington, although nobody gets enough time to show what they could really do. This will frustrate some viewers as the film comes off as a series of short takes rather than a performance in the usual sense; more like a string of cameos rather than a coherent work of character development.
Even so, the intensity of the work and the urgency of the subject carry the day.
The Dead Girl (2006)
Limited release December 29, 2006. MPAA: Rated R for language, grisly images and sexuality/nudity
Your Talkback on this Story