Bad but entertaining, “Miller’s Girl” is pure unintentional camp
It’s been a long time since we’ve had a worthy entry into the Completely Bonkers Cinematic Canon, which makes Jade Halley Bartlett’s “Miller’s Girl” a real treat. The most important quality that a Completely Bonkers film must have is a lack of self-awareness — first and foremost, it cannot wink or nudge at the audience in order to say, “hey, see what I’m doing here?” It must take itself utterly seriously, and that is what “Miller’s Girl” does so well, despite being completely divorced from any kind of recognizable reality.
The “Miller’s Girl” in question is Cairo Sweet, played by Jenna Ortega in a riff on her “Wednesday” character (she delivers her lines in a deadpan staccato). She lives in an antebellum mansion in rural Tennessee surrounded by books (many of them kept in antique birdcages for some reason) and no parents; they’re powerful lawyers who constantly travel the globe for work. Cairo describes herself in voice- over as lonely and unremarkable; her only hope is that she will soon “meet a writer,” by which she means she will attend high school.
The title “Miller’s Girl” has a double meaning: Cairo’s English teacher, the aforementioned writer, is named Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman), and also because she’s a fan of the notoriously banned novelist Henry Miller. In this public high school there appear to be all of two teachers — Mr. Miller and Coach Fillmore (Bashir Salahuddin) — and two students — Cairo and her flirty, petulant best friend Winnie (Gideon Adlon), whose catchphrase is “hungy.” The girls devise a plan to seduce their teachers, mostly because Winnie has got it bad for Coach Fillmore, and because Cairo needs a topic for her college admissions essay about her greatest accomplishment. Please do not attempt to follow the logic of this wacky screenplay.
In addition to questionable character and story beats, Bartlett makes some odd directorial choices in terms of where she places the camera for certain significant moments. But “Miller’s Girl” has a delirious style in terms of its production design by Cheyenne Ford: Jonathan teaches in a dim room lined with Persian rugs; Cairo’s “ancestral home” is filled with taxidermy and tea cups and old rotary phones.
But its most notable aesthetic trait is its script (also
written by Bartlett), which brings a new meaning to the phrase “tortured prose.” There’s the portentously over-the-top narration, and then there’s the rapid-fire dialogue that makes “Gilmore Girls” look graceful.
The locus of sexuality in “Miller’s Girl” resides entirely in words — it’s how Jonathan and his wife, the
workaholic Beatrice (Dagmara Dominczyk) seduce each other — and it’s how his inappropriate flirtation with Cairo careens off the rails. There’s a certain verve to Bartlett’s style — it’s certainly bold even if the plot turns make no sense and the character development is nil. Everyone seems to be having a fun time with the
wild Southern Gothic tone, especially Dominczyk, who is in full Blanche Dubois mode as Beatrice, only ever clad in a bra and satin robe, constantly surrounded by stacks of paper and bottles of booze.
Some might see “Miller’s Girl” as a “#Metoo” story about relationships with uneven power dynamics but it plays more like a throwback ’ 80s or ’ 90s erotic thriller like “Poison Ivy” or “Wild Things” but with a literary bent. This is pure unintentional camp, striking that wild, so-bad-it’s-entertaining chord vigorously. I can’t recommend “Miller’s Girl” but I also can’t recommend it enough.