White Girl

First time writer-director Elizabeth Woods delivers a raw, energetic, and downright uncomfortable tale about a young college student named Leah, who moves to the big apple and finds love in one of the local drug dealers named Blue, one night of partying later finds the two separated as he's arrested on possession of narcotics, and that's 3 strikes for him, and Leah must do whatever she can to be reunited with him. It's an ugly and uneasy look at white privilege, and the self destruction of such a young, promising girl who just can't seem to stay away from taking the trip down the white brick road. This is a roaring directorial debut from Elizabeth Woods, and quite the controversial, personal one at that.

This is an interesting film, one with probably more potential for future greatness than actual rewatch value. The acting is top notch all around, from the two leads who go through many changes to the lawyer who has truly seen it all delivering a chilling speech about black people in jail. A very promising debut from a female director that knows her stuff, from the moment doves fly away when two lovers are reunited or that moment when the camera gets tired of watching the white girl getting taken advantage of too many times and hides from the scene behind a wall before going back to a mirror reflection of said image. While at times playing like a softcore porno a la Game of Thrones and there are too many sex scenes just thrown around, the drama is intact and the WAY that the story is told is very compelling.

This movie is terrible. Obviously the ending is the worst part but that doesn't mean the rest is any good. People saying how "real" this movie is but they have no idea what they're talking about. I'm being generous with a 4/10, go watch something else.

Unlike most reviewers I saw this movie with intimate knowledge of street life, and the director got a whole lot right there. And as well, I've known noobs like the lead actress who got themselves into a life about which they knew very little until they were so deep in so fast they couldn't get back out. So with that, I was on my seat edge as our heroine went from precipice to precipice, nearly always avoiding the fall. Without a spoiler alert, she does virtually everything in this film you could to get killed or maimed and the writer/director finds ways for her to fail yet survive.

There's a lot of grit here, from hard parties to transactional activities between employer and employee, and then client and counsel. It was all done very realistically, scarily so in many cases.I would love to know where the writer/director got her adviser on street sales - whoever it was really knew the game. See this movie.But be prepared to be scared, if you know the streets.

During the publicity blitz for this movie director and writer Elizabeth Wood made a big deal about how this was based on her real life experiences, how unshocking it was (while simultaneously playing up that their were tons of sex scenes and nudity to play up the shock factor) and how unfair it was that white women like herself were able to dabble in drugs for fun in college, while their Latino and black peers were treated like criminals for far lesser offences. Now all these things led me to expect a much different movie, but watching White Girl I was almost bored by how tame and basic it was and how little it had to say beyond that one message.

Morgan Saylor plays Wood's alter ego Leah. Moving into a cheap apartment in a bad (i.e. predominately Latino) neighbourhood with her friend Katie, Leah is immediately attracted to some young Latino men she sees hanging around her street corner. One night, bored and out of weed she introduces herself to them. When they refuse to sell to her she later meets one of them, named Blue, and invites him up to her apartment. They quickly fall in love and Leah helps him upsell his cocaine at exorbitant prices to her wealthy white friends. Of course this all predictably goes bad and Leah lands in a dangerous situation where she feels compelled to save Blue, who has landed in prison.

The strange thing is how boring and formulaic this all feels. I watched a scene with Morgan Saylor bouncing around in a rave with her top off and all I wondered was when the movie would be over. We watch Leah make manic decision after ridiculous decision always protected by the fact that she is young, middle class and white. But it's hard to feel for a character when she's her own worst enemy and you can see her mistakes coming a million miles away. Another thing is, if Wood was so hell bent on showing how white people have the privilege of getting away with things that their black and brown peers can't telling the story from the perspective of the white girlfriend was a huge mistake.

It's too bad, I really had high hopes for this, but it fell short. A more interesting take on millennial hedonism and race and class in America is Spring Breakers which is over the top and ridiculous in a way that packs more punch than White Girl.