52 Films by Women Vol 8. 41. Miller’s Girl (Director: Jade Halley Bartlett)
Studios can have bad
years. 2024 is the turn of Lionsgate. First, the John Wick spin-off Ballerina was pulled from the summer schedule. Then Borderlands and The Crow tanked. This fall, Lionsgate is releasing Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, a bold decidedly uncommercial pet project
of the director and vineyard owner, who I suspect knows something about bad
harvests. Personally, I’m disappointed Coppola’s film isn’t the long-awaited
sequel to Zootropolis.
Lionsgate’s bad year
began with Miller’s Girl, which grossed less than $900,000 from a $4
million budget. Written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, the Tennessee-set
drama stars Martin Freeman as unsuccessful author turned literature teacher
Jonathan Miller, whose encouragement of a bright student, Cairo Sweet (Jenna
Ortega) goes sour. Cairo has been abandoned by her parents who are lawyers.
‘What kind?’ she is asked. ‘Expensive,’ she replies. They leave her alone in a
big ol’ mansion, where all she does is read. She has devoured every one of the
twelve novels on Mr Miller’s reading list and comes into the classroom carrying
a copy of Henry Miller’s ‘Under the Roofs of Paris’, which contains explicit words
not normally tolerated outside of university. Also in her pile of books,
carried for effect it seems, is Jonathan Miller’s ‘Apostrophes &
Ampersands’, his sole novel, described by one critic as ‘over-reaching without
ambition’. Cairo doesn’t tell Mr Miller what she thinks of his novel, but she
quotes it to him. ‘I was not prepared for that,’ says Jonathan, who as it turns
out, isn’t prepared for Cairo either.
Barlett isn’t the
first director to cast a British actor as an American. Paul Thomas Anderson and
Steven Spielberg turned to Daniel Day Lewis as the lead in There Will Be Blood and Lincoln
respectively. Freeman is best known to American audiences as Dr John Watson,
foil to Benedict Cumberbatch’s contemporary Sherlock Holmes, and he has been
inducted into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, appearing in Black Panther. He’s associated more with comedy than drama
and is not hyper-masculine. We read Freeman’s Jonathan as a man capable of
putting himself in a compromising position (which he does) but not a predator.
He might be a romantic. Inspiring students to reach their potential is a form
of romanticism.
Bartlett first
worked the material into a play in 2011 before resurrecting it after a brief
career as an actress and after working on the screenplay of the sequel to Doctor Strange. Miller’s
Girl covers the same territory
as David Mamet’s play Oleanna. However, there is a key difference. Cairo
comes from a wealthy family and she’s angry about being left alone. As her
voiceover tells us, she doesn’t know what it is to be an adult. She is a knot
of hormonal tension.
The film exists in its own hyper reality. Miller’s class appears to be entirely female. There are boys at the school, but they don’t feature as characters, rather background extras, the kind you can pull to one side to ask, ‘is that girl real?’ (A line from Kevin Smith’s The 4:30 Movie.) There are no other teachers represented aside from Boris Fillmore (Bashir Salahuddin), an overweight Physics Teacher who bakes his own biscuits (the bread kind, not cookies) which he shares with Miller. He brings coffee. ‘Why do you always hold my coffee to ransom?’ Miller asks him at one point. ‘Why do you never buy me coffee?’ you expect Fillmore to reply. He is single, a character detail that struck me as odd. If he bakes his own biscuits, think what else he could do in the kitchen. He’s an occasional guest at Miller’s home. ‘You really ought to stop leaving your door open,’ he tells Miller and his wife, Beatrice June Harker (Dagmara Dominczyk) as he pops round one evening. A lot of beer is drunk in Miller’s place – Stella Artois rather than Miller Lite. Fillmore drinks Blue Moon, which has been popping up in a number of movies lately including Your Monster and the George McKay-Lea Seydoux film The Beast. Beatrice is constantly depicted at her laptop receiving texts from a colleague preceded by a rude word. The text alerts appear on the screen. Frequently close to an alcoholic beverage, Beatrice is shown in a satin robe open to her underwear. We only once see her in day clothes. At one point, with Miller sitting at the dining table opposite her, a sea of papers and an occasional bottle between them, she exclaims, ‘I can’t work like this.’ Miller heads for the shed where, having read Cairo’s mid-term paper (25% of her overall grade), he pleasures himself.
Pictured: Product placement in the 2024 drama, 'Miller's Girl', written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, featuring Martin Freeman (left), Bashir Salahuddin and Dagmara Dominczyk. Still courtesy of Lionsgate.
In interviews,
Bartlett describes Miller as the villain. However, he doesn’t display those
tendencies which can be summarised as lust, a desire for world domination, or explaining
himself before the hero escapes and saves the day. Rather Miller sets Cairo a
mid-term assignment of writing a short story in the style of the writer she
most admires. ‘I thought you’d like that,’ he adds. She emails him a story
written in the style of Henry Miller in which a teacher, Mr Murphy, and a
student engage in an illicit affair. After Miller’s aforementioned reaction, he
shuts her down. ‘If you don’t rewrite this, I will fail you,’ he tells her. She
gives Miller plenty of literary reasons to justify her story: challenging
conventions, and so on. The subtext is clear. Miller does not want to have a
relationship with his student.
Cairo is not the
only provocateur in Miller’s class. Winnie (Gideon Adlon, the daughter of Babes director Pamela Adlon) declares herself to be a lesbian but ‘is keeping
her options open’. Winnie and Cairo hang out, mostly in Miller’s classroom but
also at Cairo’s home. Winnie is a talented graphic designer, or so Cairo
explains to Fillmore and Miller when they are at the running track and enjoying
coffee and biscuits. ‘You should market these,’ Cairo tells Fillmore. Winnie
can design the logo. In Miller’s classroom there is an awkward scene in which
Fillmore enters his number into Winnie’s phone. This allows Winnie to send him
a provocative photograph, Cairo playing to Winnie’s fluid desire.
‘There’s no such
thing as censorship,’ says Winnie in Miller’s classroom. ‘We have the
internet.’ ‘And yet there is,’ replies Miller. This is a film that doesn’t take
place in Florida, where books that might challenge right wing Republicans’ view
of the world have been taken off the shelf. In Tennessee, there are poetry
afternoons. Miller invites Cairo to one in order to show her that she is not
living in the boondocks. As her voiceover explains, Cairo desperately wants
Miller to attend, and he does. A moustachioed man in a woollen tank top
(Augustine Hargrave) enraptures the crowd. Afterwards, Miller and Cairo smoke
together. It is practically post coital.
We want Miller to be
honest about Cairo to his wife and he is, though after he finds Cairo’s phone
in his satchel minutes before he and Beatrice are due to head away from the
weekend, the film conceals details from us. Returning the phone, Miller starts
outside in the rain. Cairo is in an evening dress standing in the doorway.
Miller asks her to come closer, even though the rain will spoil her look. A
wall of water separates them. Cairo approaches. We don’t know exactly what
happens next.
Did Miller enter
Cairo’s house? Explaining himself to Principal Joyce Manor (Christine Adams),
he says that he didn’t sleep with her. ‘I feel that nothing I am going to say
is going to alter the fact that you think I did something bad,’ Miller retorts.
‘That’s because you did do something bad,’ replies Joyce. He faces the loss of
his job, the end of his friendship with Fillmore and the termination of his
marriage. ‘I married a writer!’ Beatrice exclaims, disappointed that Miller no
longer puts fingers to keyboard.
Pictured: 'You've a lot more to lose than just your job.' Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman) receives a warning from his wife Beatrice (Dagmara Dominiczyk) in a scene from the 2024 drama, 'Miller's Girl', written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett. Still courtesy of Lionsgate.
One option is to
take what has happened to him as a springboard back into fiction. Miller stares
at the blank unsaved page. He isn’t going to. Fiction can articulate a way of
seeing the world, but it is also an act of discovery. The inference is that Miller
knows all he needs to about the situation he is in. A novel will serve no
purpose.
Before the end,
Cairo stands over Miller, looking down at him. He rejected her. She curses him
as a failure, mediocre, repeating the descriptor, ‘over-reaching without
ambition’. She infers that he could have had her. He knows that their
relationship would be inappropriate.
You expect the final
part of the film will be Miller fighting for everything he is about to lose,
exposing Cairo as a damaged student whose upbringing turned her against adults.
Though they are in different spaces - he on the steps of his building, she in a
corridor - she appears to be walking towards and finally standing in front of
him. Yet she isn’t. The film ends, Miller left to an uncertain future.
Pictured: 'I'm tied to a landline.' Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega) requests the return of her mobile phone in a scene from the 2024 drama, 'Miller's Girl', written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett. Still courtesy of Lionsgate.
‘Aren’t you afraid
of walking through the woods by yourself?’ Fillmore asks Cairo. ‘I’m the
scariest thing in there,’ Cairo replies. To an extent, she is correct. She is a
femme fatale, capable of wreaking havoc, a narcissist, a dilettante, whose only
ambition is to find herself. She isn’t vulnerable, impressionable, exposed to
false signals and encouraged to hold false expectations. In the final part of
the film, she exercises her power over Winnie, preventing her from testifying
in favour of Mr Miller. She has the compromising photograph. She can ruin
Fillmore too.
Does Bartlett think
Cairo’s revenge is justified? Apparently yes, though male viewers may not see
it that way. Ortega excels as the child woman mantrap. She is perfectly cast
down to her brown eyes contrasting with Freeman’s blue ones. Freeman/Mr Miller is
out of his league. He doesn’t have the same ability to command our attention.
Miller’s workplace seems less like a college and more like a library, but that doesn’t stop us suspending disbelief. This is a film about an impossible relationship in which the only appropriate response is to treat every student the same. It is the singling out of Cairo that makes Miller a villain, believing her to be exceptional. How dare he?
Reviewed on Amazon Prime streaming service, Saturday 14 September 2024
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