All the Real Girls

World premiere at SUNDANCE 2003. Has a distributor (Sony) and will be in limited release on February 14

OFFICIAL PLOT SUMMARY: Twenty-two-year-old Paul lives with his beloved mom and works as a grease monkey in a broken down North Carolina mill town. Unambitious, he has a devoted circle of rowdy friends and a reputation as a callous heartbreaker. When he meets his best friend's sister Noel, fresh from her boarding school graduation, the two fall into a perfect, real, terrifying love. They share innermost secrets and inhabit a sweet, dreamy bubble of mutual admiration and understanding.

COMMENTS: The film has to be accepted on its own terms. Slow-paced, sensitive, and dreamy, it gets deep inside of its characters. Paul may be a callous seducer, but he's so gentle with the girl he loves, that he won't even take her virginity when they get a hotel room. When she makes some mistakes that he considers betrayal, this blue-collar tough guy is just as heartbroken and emotionally vulnerable as anybody with more "refinement". Although he is a mechanic in a Southern podunk town, his character is portrayed without any Southern or working class stereotypes.

It's a collaborative movie made by college buddies. Director David Gordon Green and star Paul Schneider also co-wrote the screenplay, and went to college together. Editor Zene Baker is another college buddy. I suppose you might truly call this a true collaboration. Green has the title of director, but when your two best buds are also your editor and screenwriter, not to mention the fact that one of them is on camera constantly, it's difficult to say where one person's contribution ends and another's begins.

If you would enjoy a slice of life comedy/drama that will probably evoke many memories of how you felt when you won and then lost your first love, this is an effective and heartfelt personal statement about that moment of time. The small town locales and the original score work to perfection.

Not the way we were in the Hollywood sense, and maybe not a big box office kind of picture, but an insightful look at the way we really were.

These young fellas are good, dawg!

In a small town, Paul (Paul Schneider) and Tip (Shea Whigham) are best friends, and Paul is the great seducer, having shagged twenty-six girls in the town. When Tip's sister Noel (Zooey Deschanel) and Paul date and fall in love for each other, the friendship of Tip and Paul is shaken. After a short trip of Noel to a house nearby a lake with her girlfriends, the relationship of Paul and Noel changes.

"All the Real Girls" is a very real and simple love story. The situations in this low-budget movie are very convincing, and the cast is really good. Zooey Deschanel is a really a beautiful woman, has a stunning performance and shows a great chemistry with Paul Schneider. The participation of Patricia Clarkson in a support role is excellent as usual. The open end fits adequately to this single and awarded romance. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Prova de Amor" ("Proof of Love")

Low budget and low tech, director David Gordon Green's "All the Real Girls" first struck viewer nerves at Sundance and it will do so everywhere.

Set in Appalachia with shots of the beautiful mountains juxtaposed with a town that never knew prosperity and is left behind in today's North Carolina where the Research Triangle is where it's at, this is a truly affecting and universal story of first love. It's told honestly, without either director's affectation or cast overacting. The story has soul.

Zooey Deschanel plays, outstandingly, a girl, "Noel," returned from boarding school where she's been since age twelve. She plays the trombone and doesn't want to go to college. She's never had a real job and seems not to have acquired much if any ambition or sophistication while away from home. She's a virgin and it's clear that hardly any of her contemporaries who didn't leave town are even remotely chaste. In fact, the suggestion is that most sleep with virtually all the young guys. Including two, "Paul," played by Paul Schneider and his best friend "Tip," portrayed with a brooding intensity by Shea Wigham. Tip is also Noel's brother and protective of her he is. So when his formerly carefree gangbanging bud, Paul, falls head over heels for Noel and she reciprocates he has issues.

The story is universal: the joy and pain of a serious first love, the pitfalls of communication, the unawareness of how words told and events improvidently related can be like mines going off. The simple but inevitable price exacted by inexperience and not just sexual.

There is a quiet and achingly familiar reality to Noel's and Paul's relationship. Anyone honest will recognize himself or herself from some early life. Anyone who genuinely doesn't has missed some pain but at a price. Director Green unflinchingly unravels the mysteries of growing wiser, a necessary but in some ways sad departure from innocence.

Without drugs or crime or a social commentary on the moribund economy of a gorgeous region, the film focuses on the two young people and their families and friends. They are recognizable, worthy of caring about.

When Paul, trying to understand Noel's not wholly consistent emotions and actions, blurts out that he's not that smart, a number of people in the audience chortled and several yelled out "No, you're not." They didn't understand that his comment wasn't self-denigratory but a nakedly honest confession of confusion and fear of loss. Haven't we all experienced that?

8/10.

I went into this movie with absolutley no expectations, and it seems I was better off than a lot of people who reviewed it negatively. This is by far one of the best, most realistic romance films (or films in general) I've ever seen. Not everyone likes to be beaten over the head by unrealistic Cinderella stories, and this movie is perfect for people who are sick of funny and romantic "romps." Not to say it isn't both funny and romantic, because it is. It's just strikingly different from most. I loved the stark cinematography, the beautifully understated and timeless soundtrack and, most of all, the superbly real acting in this film. (Patricia Clarkson is God.) I enjoy the human comedy, even when it doesn't end on a tradtionally happy note, and this is right up there with "Harold and Maude" in my list of favorite relationship movies ever. The bottom line is this movie made me feel. Sometimes happy and sometimes sad, I never found myself disinterested in what would happen next. No, I don't recommend it if you're looking for the next "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." But if you're looking to feel something and can handle a film with pacing that allows you to analyze your emotions between scenes, this is it. Of course, it also helps that Paul Schneider is the cutest, quirkiest guy I've seen break down in a long time. Likewise, Zooey Deschanel's performance was authentic and devastating. I loved this movie.

"All the Real Girls" is a beautiful effort by writer/director David Gordon Green to visualize inarticulate people as they struggle with love.

The scenic North Carolina landscape surrounds the characters as they seek, unsuccessfully, for comparable inner beauty with romance and family. But human interactions can't be as perfect as a sunset.

Every person here is hurting in some way (including a widower uncle and a developmentally disabled brother), and if they aren't in the beginning they are by the end as they have to learn to stop idealizing the people they love, who can't live up to that. Some reconcile to it, some can't, and none can explain it.

In this small town, everyone knows everyone's business and heart and can't walk away from that intimacy. While that is realistic and the dialogue is very naturalistic, it's a bit unsatisfying to watch as a romantic drama.

Hunky co-creator Paul Schneider (strikingly like young Kevin Costner) sets up the confusion when he tries to convince us he's the town heartbreaker; I did not pick up for quite awhile that he was supposed to be such a bad boy as he just seemed so sweet from the first scene on. His laidback scenes with aggressive Zooey Deschanel are full of such tenderness as the full force of First True Love hits them, that the disappointments that follow are are quite the downer.

"Tully" had very similar character and story arcs, and, while schmaltzier, was more satisfying as a movie experience.

The alt-country instrumental and song soundtrack, including Mark Olson & the Creekdippers, is quite poignant.