There are an endless amount of philosophies and ample pieces of advice on how to become a good writer or create a good piece of fiction. Miller’s Girl, the feature debut of writer-director Jade Halley Bartlett, attempts to interface with something more meaningful… what makes a writer. Co-produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg‘s Point Grey Pictures, the film centers on high school student Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega of Wednesday and Scream fame) as she forms a close relationship with her literature teacher Jonathan Miller (veteran actor Martin Freeman best known from Sherlock). After he assigns her a challenging writing assignment, the nature of their relationship morphs into an increasingly complex web of deception.
The root of Cairo’s strife is her loneliness, her boredom. The film opens as she laments about how her rich lawyer parents leave her in a large empty house – she only finds solace in reading and writing. She dreams of attending Yale, but she must write an essay about her greatest accomplishment in order to do so. Cairo quickly realizes she has none, as she’s been insulated in the bubble of her privilege and small Tennessee town. She’s just itching for a taste of real experience. After being inspired by her best friend Winnie (Gideon Adlon) who loves to flirt with high school coach Boris Fillmore (Bashir Salahuddin) for fun, Cairo sets her sights on seducing Jonathan Miller. Unlike the other teachers, Miller shows her a great deal of affection for being such a bright student and talented young writer.
Jonathan Miller turned to teaching after his first novel was critically panned. His wife Beatrice (Dagmara Domińczyk, Succession) is a writer though. She’s attractive but barbed, wounding him with his inadequacy from time. Naturally, Jonathan finds himself entranced by the wiles of his brilliant high school protégé. Not all losers seek validation from a high school student. However, all adults who seek validation from high school students are losers, which is why it is so difficult to take this movie seriously, especially as the psychollgical thriller it desperatley wants to be.
The film’s set design is drenched in earthy tones and classic architecture. All the books are either leatherbound, clothbound, or fitted with retro covers. Cairo writes by the light of numerous black candles in her clawfooted bathtub. She makes calls from her rotary landline, wears a backpack resembling a suitcase, and sits at gold banquet chairs in a classroom furnished with vintage fringe lamps and worn oriental-style rugs on scuffed hardwood floors. Everything is old and practically rotting away. Taking place in the South, Miller’s Girl embodies a Gothic atmosphere as it attempts to portray the themes of alienation common to the genre.
To properly interact with Miller’s Girl, the audience must concede that Cairo and Jonathan are two people who have compelling, complicated emotions worth dissecting. However, that’s not really the case. Her desires stem from naive foolishness while his come from insecurity. It’s never any more complex than that. Throughout the movie, Cairo’s character is portrayed bizarrely. She’s a teenage girl with a terrible crush, but her relationship with Jonathan is often dramatically framed. In one of these moments, the two embrace each other under the rain as she’s draped in a white satin slip dress, leaving the viewer confused.
When Cairo is angry, she’s always elevated above the person she rips to bits with her words. She’s cold and calculating, born from a place of hurt, but the other characters fear her as if she’s dark and unstable. Miller’s wife warns that “Teenage girls are dangerous, they’re full of emotional violence and vituperation.” Definition of vituperation: bitter and abusive language. Emotional violence and vituperation do not make a teenage girl dangerous because most people do not listen to teenage girls, even the smart ones. Though the narrative recognizes Cairo’s victimhood, it also forces her to possess an agency that feels out of place.
The story at hand slips into periods of self-awareness. Miller’s wife points out how good vocabulary does not make a good writer, mocking how he was impressed by Cairo’s Sesquipedalian short story (if her writing was meant to be good within the story, well, that’s another issue altogether). Jonathan can be found reading Stephen King’s On Writing in one scene, an embarrassingly elementary introduction to the craft that any English teacher should have a firm grasp on. Miller eventually calls Cairo a child and she calls him a coward. Though, unfortunately, these are not the central thematics of the film.
No, the final resolution of Miller’s Girl comes from the two main character’s reaction to their predicament. Cairo tearfully recites a monologue about the experience, implying that if Arthur Miller accepts his active participation in their relationship, then he will be able to write again. By the end of the movie, it is fully realized that the titular Miller in Miller’s Girl is not Arthur Miller, but Henry Miller, the controversial author whom Cairo chooses to mimic in her final project. Because she is fully able to internalize the relationship she was a part of and lets herself be changed by it, she is transformed into a true writer. The act of being a writer comes from not only gaining experience but also being an active presence in it rather than a passive one.
This is an immature idea and an idealization of what a writer is. Acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin once touched on this desire to garner experience to write in “The Question I Get Most Often” from her essay collection The Wave in the Mind. “Aspiring writers keep telling me they’ll start writing when they’ve gathered experience. Usually, I keep my mouth shut, but sometimes I can’t control myself and ask them, ah, like Jane Austen? Like the Brontë sisters? Those women with their wild, mad lives crammed full of gut-wrenching adventure working as stevedores in the Congo and shooting up drugs in Rio and hunting lions on Kilimanjaro and having sex in SoHo and all that stuff that writers have to do – well, that some writers have to do?”
Le Guin then goes on to clarify that experience does not make good writing, it is context. Young writers haven’t lived long enough to understand how their experiences fit into the world around them. She says that writers are not required to sample every experience in the world, but it is more important for them to internalize their own experiences in a larger picture. Experience is not a shortcut to maturity.
As Cairo finally reflects on her relationship with Jonathan Miller, the questions she asks herself are meant to exemplify how she will make real writing out of it. However, a real writer could have meaningfully reflected on their own high school romances without attempting to sleep with their English teacher. Cairo interprets “write what you know” to the ultra literal, and at the end of her arc, she’s still chained within the same restrictive cage.
Miller’s Girl is not deep. Its conclusions are cheap and it mistakes misplaced emotions for complex ones. The film’s allegory is inherently flawed and distracting in an attempt to be salacious. It drops lines such as “was my error in the reaching or the wanting” as if a teenage girl could be properly blamed for either. The only truly noteworthy performance comes from Jenna Ortega, who embodies the allegedly prodigious teenager with an appropriate measure of impressive vitriol. The established actors of the bunch, Martin Freeman and Dagmara Domińczyk, do the best with the lines they’re given, but it is impossible to elevate the material. While ambitiously conceived, the highlight being its meticulous set design, Miller’s Girl does not rise above its amateur constraints.
