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.

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.

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.

One can never get a good movie with a bad script. Add mediocre acting and things are going to get worse. Average camera is not going to help. And so on. It's down and down and even more down.

The characters are flat. The stories are flat. Sex? Sure. Boring. Sex is just a way to add viewership. Only to dump the moralist story: this is what happens when girls want to have fun. No. The vagina was meant to take babies out. Naughty girls get in trouble and than are raped. See? Girls should be pure. Find a middle class home in a middle class neighborhood and raise healthy children through the most recent parenting fads.

Thematically, White Girl is exactly what it says on the tin, it's about race, and about gender. It's an attempt at outlining the main character's naivety and her ability to come out of it unscathed as a result of her privilege. An idea that, if it wasn't already obvious enough, Elizabeth Wood beats us over the head with in the scene where Leah has dinner with the lawyer.

White Girl is unapologetically feminist, and being directed by a woman, it gets a lot of this right, Leah isn't a trope, she's not a stereotype, she's a naive young girl who makes a lot of really, really terrible decisions. But while this is the basis of her character, the protagonist, as well as the rest of the people in this film, are only explored on a surface level. Meaning that it's difficult to care about what they do, or what happens to them. Especially Leah, who knows that as a pretty white girl, there's a lot that she can get away with, and come out unharmed. And we know that too.

Not only is White Girl difficult to get pulled in to as a result of its lack of a real sense of consequence, it also seems to push us away with its sloppy attempt at shock cinema. Every other scene is someone snorting coke, getting their tits out, or puking their guts up (is there anyone in this movie who doesn't do drugs?) Some of the comments on sexuality, especially female sexuality are interesting, and there's clearly a lot to say here about the male gaze and the danger of that towards young women, but then the gratuitous sex scenes never stop in an attempt to shock us, and we lose interest.

As a drug dealer drama, and a comment on race, Wood hits all of the tropes that we'd expect. Many of the characters are stereotypes, and the writing for the male drug dealers sounds like it was written by my dad, guessing how he things a drug dealer probably talks. The attempts at making the love interest more of a love interest and less of a sex interest were hilarious at times, this movie just couldn't get the dialogue right for those characters at all, it was awkward as hell.

White Girl was summed up for me when Doug from The Hangover got cocaine snorted off his dick.

4.5/10