The Girl (2013)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Good concept, poorly executed.

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Ashley (Abbie Cornish) is a poor Texan mother who loses custody of her son after a drunk driving incident. She desperately wants her son back from foster care. Her father Tommy (Will Patton) lives on the Mexican side of Loredo. She discovers that he traffics illegals over the border. While over in Mexico, she tries to organize a crossing for $500 per person. However the group gets swept away. She's left with a little girl whose mother drowned. Her father's advise is to simply walk away.Director/writer David Riker's story is a simplified idea culminating in what exactly Ashley will do with the girl. The movie depends mostly on Abbie Cornish's performance. She's very stone-faced in most of this movie. I see the frustrated 'stressed' woman that she's portraying. It's a very subtle performance although a few additional animated scenes would be great. The combative little girl is done well.

As I started watching The Girl (2012), from the beginning scenes it absorbed me in itself, letting me lose my control over things as an outside observer but rather float inside the story observing it directly as a third person inside the screen; I enjoyed that very much. Abbie Cornish portraits elegance and delicacy of a woman in this movie as she did in Bright Star (2009) prior to this, and features perfect sense of motherhood as she did in Candy (2006) in the scene of miscarrying the baby, but here more sophisticated. She plays Ashley, a single mother who is in danger of losing her nearly five year old son named Georgie to a woman named Gloria who can't have kids and at the moment is fostering him and according to Ashley has a plan of adopting him like the two other kids that she has already fostered and then adopted. She is from San Antonio-Texas. She can't afford a proper house and lives in a trailer. Her salary is so low and the raise she was supposed to get after three months working in a convenience store which now is turning to a year, was dismissed; "You didn't get a raise because of your attitude", says Mr. Chavez, the manager. But as the movie goes on we find out that she has no attitude and is so modest and responsible. Ashley has no money and to win in the court, she has to prove to CPS (Child Protective Services) that she is eligible to take care of her son. In a surprise visit, Ashley's father shows up on her door step and when he finds her daughter sad asks her to go and celebrate with him in Mexico. He even goes further and gives her money to buy her son a set swing claiming that he's been on lucky street in his work but later she finds that her dad is a human trafficker. In spite of despising her father for that, in an act of desperation, Ashley starts trafficking Mexicans to Austin-Texas herself. She is a beginner and doesn't know that in order to cross the river they will need inner tubes which leads to the loss of Rosa's mother, a stubborn young girl who blames Ashley for loss of her mother and claims searching for her. Looking through the drown people in police station, Ashley finds out that Rosa's mother is dead which makes her to feel more responsible for the girl. Her maternal sense doesn't allow her to hand the girl over to the strangers. She even tries to postpone her court to find her family. Rosa has no family but a grandmother in the middle of nowhere in a beautiful mountain land. I never knew Mexico had such an amazing green landscapes; it seemed a trip to heaven for me. There are scenes of desperation and poverty in the movie which made me sympathize with the Latino America, but no sympathy seems better than splitting out the word "God damn" which Ashley did after she took a through look around and saw the misery in people's looks. Ashley smokes a lot and in her definition of "Stressed" she regards it as one of being adult effects. That may be true in some senses. Her face though, is a dictionary of the word, "Stress". However, most of the times she manages it in a wise manner with her responsible choices and acceptance. Inner struggles of a mother with her conscience over a responsibility of a child and trying to win her own child back has perfectly, beautifully, and purely been pictured in this movie and what is the most mind capturing feature is combining it with natural sounds around and sometimes letting silence tell the story which is what David Riker as the director has certainly been successful at.

This was a wonderful film that stirred the heart but that ultimately did not complete the 'karma' that was called for (see the film.) Ashley's predicament is fairly typical of many Americans who feel that the system is stacked against them failing to see the inherent flaws in their character that is the true cause of their problems. The cast was spot-on in their acting especially Ashley (Abbie Cornish)and Rosa (Maritza Hernandez.) They carried the film and Rosa just about breaks your heart whenever the pixie is on screen.The two points that really stayed with me though after viewing the film were:1.The scale of the desperation that drives people to extreme and dangerous measures to escape the grinding poverty that is overwhelming and that destroys families. The hollow resigned faces of the people attempting to cross into the U.S. are haunting. And...2. The lack of a fitting resolution to the problem created by Ashley's actions. She owed Rosa much more.I don't think I put any information that might be considered a spoiler but since I'm new to writing reviews, I checked the spoiler box just in case. But to sum up, I really enjoyed this film for it's realism and the excelsior performance by the actors.

I had no opinions or expectation on this film. It all started out with a crush on Abbie Cornish, but I ended up with a great deal of respect for her acting (and her Spanish) in this film. She showed a side of her that I had never seen before, but more importantly the film (and Abbie) made me aware of the culture on both sides of the Rio. The film starts with a sharp edge on the Texas side of the river, proceeds into a learning phase for me and Abbie/Ashley, and finally it softens and becomes a touching film on the Mexico side. Ashley is a much better person at the end of the film than the beginning - I hope that this is not considered a spoiler. I recommend this film wholeheartedly.