Flak Magazine: Review of The Girl Next Door, 04.09.03

The Girl Next Door will be hailed as Risky Business for the new millennium — but is that really an honor? That 1983 movie is a TNT "New Classic," of course, because of Tom Cruise's whitey-tighties and Ray-Bans. But can we just give a pass to a movie which proffers that a heart-of-gold prostitute is more essential to a boy's education than a scholarship to Princeton? The movie supposes that the riskiest business is a boy's first lay, after which life just sort of all works out. Of course, the premise itself provides the film's cheat: Joel doesn't deal with the delicate emotional issues of adolescent sexuality because that first coupling is with a pro who coaches him right through. Rebecca DeMornay's Lana is not only talented in these sorts of naughty things, but she also instructs Joel on the real-world ruthlessness of business (which, according to the movie, is all prostitution is) and she's a moral voice of reason. Even better, their relationship is a form of psychotherapy for her. Renewed by Joel's innocence and maturation, Lana straightens up and falls in love; they live happily ever after. The movie, preposterous as it is, has a sort of odd integrity, achieving a tone of outlandish nervousness that few teen movies can match; a movie this strange, with such strange notions, has to be onto something. Risky Business has the guts to take the teen sex comedy all the way, so to speak — it's the experienced older brother to Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

The Girl Next Door, which swaps DeMornay's prostitute for Elisha Cuthbert's porn actress, cribs damn near its entire plot from Risky Business. It also harbors a similar juvenile vision of sex — its tagline "Live the dream" translates into "Take a porn star to prom." As with Risky Business, the boy (Matthew "Kidman," as opposed to Risky's Joel "Goodson") earns his spectacular lay because he sees the real her: the gentle, golden heart lurking within the sexual vessel. Danielle (Elisha Cuthbert) moves into a relative's home next door (which thankfully has a full-landscape window pointed at the Kidmans' house) to try to get herself together after a stint in the porn biz. Matthew (Emile Hirsh) is the student council president and Georgetown prospect who has life's every advantage, but needs that extra something to push him over the top. If this relationship sounds unlikely, then wait until Danielle's "producer" (Timothy Oliphant) gets involved, or when Matthew's friend, who wears a Vivid Video hat to school, gets some wild and crazy ideas.

Director Luke Greenfield has only The Animal on his resume — yes, the Rob Schneider movie — but to his credit, he seems to realize that the glory of Risky Business is its discordant tone, which he tries to replicate. The problem is that instead of being edgy, The Girl Next Door is simply absurd. Risky Business helps keep its conceit aloft by documenting, with great authenticity, its time and culture, but in that regard The Girl Next Door is tin-eared. The movie opens with a montage of Matthew's high school, in which the jocks look like they're from "The O.C.," the nerds gleefully compare iBooks and the eternal sunshine of spotless minds shines over the premises — so far so good. But Greenfield scores the scene with "Under Pressure" by Queen. Nothing about this California setting suggests anything having to do with Queen. Or, for that matter, later song selections like "Baba O'Reilly" or "Sweet Home Alabama." Maybe the original "Lady Marmalade" fits thematically, but why choose Patti Labelle over Christina Aguilera and Pink for a modern high school? Sure, the tunes are cool, but what the hell do they have to do with this movie?

This inconsistency plagues the entire movie. The wacky premise is played for farcical laughs (hey, she's a porn star, after all), but the fantasy of dreamgirl sex come true is played with a Nicolas Sparks-type earnestness. The shifts between serious and wacky are so wild that the film feels like a bunch of scenes, rather than a skillfully crafted, coherent narrative. Over one 15-minute sequence, Matthew gives a big speech while high, to comic effect — except that we're supposed to take his drunken moralizing seriously. Then he's chased by a killer pimp, which is played for high drama; this is followed by a beating so brutal that it doesn't belong in a film with wacky porn stars. But then Matthew's friends hit the scene, so we accelerate back into wacky comedy again. Then Danielle, the porn star, tries to save the day. Is this supposed to be satirical? Straight? Both? What the hell is going on?

As if the tonal mess weren't enough, the movie is riddled with plot holes that wreak increasing confusion. Simply put, The Girl Next Door wants to be more than a teen sex comedy — it wants to say something, but the narrative is so loose that it has no idea how to make its point. Greenfield has said that the original draft of this movie (penned by the gentlemen who brought you Van Wilder and My Baby's Daddy) took about nine months to rework into something "with a message," but they haven't changed the original script's outlandish jokes into something consistent with its newfound earnestness. The movie wants to say something "real" about a teen's discovery of the difference between sex and love but conveys its point though the scenes in which a porno is filmed in the school library. In the American Pie movies, this might have been Stiflerian bawdiness contrasted with Jim's romantic sobriety, but here it's played for catharsis. The Girl Next Door wants to be Stifler and Jim at the same time, and there's simply not enough consistent internal logic for this to work. Rather than being all movies for all audiences, it just ends up being for people who really want to see Elisha Cuthbert in a thong.

Greenfield does have one intriguing, if slightly insane, idea threaded through the movie. Matthew is the student council president, and he has even raised enough money to help bring some poor Asian kid to come to his high school so that he might "cure cancer." Matthew's on his way to Georgetown, pending a scholarship that he has to win by giving a speech. Matthew is, obviously, without mojo, and if he's going to become the leader he's pegged for, he's got to get some swagger — sounds like a job for a recovering porn star. In fact, this task is downright patriotic. When Matthew is caught spying on Danielle stripping in front of her window, she marches over to his house and demands that his parents let him talk to her. Matthew is naturally scared out of his mind, so how does he work up the courage to go down and face the object of his lust? A giant poster of Uncle Sam, fingered pointed right at him, directing "I Want You." You see, Matthew wants to be just like his hero JFK, and in order to be a successful Democrat, you have to be able to score with the ladies. That's why Danielle is as essential, if not more so, to Matthew's future aspirations than Georgetown. If I were willing to give Greenfield more credit, I might consider the later scenes — in which Matthew descends into the trenches of Las Vegas to rescue Danielle from exploitation as a porn actress and bring her with him to Georgetown — to be a hilarious satire of his JFK aspirations. Instead, we're treated to moralizing about the real "moral fabric" of society, which to Greenfield means angelic, redemptive porn stars. Take this line in which Matthew's friend tries to convince him to make his move on Danielle: "You can still like her with your penis inside her. Matthew, I tell you that you're going to regret this. What would JFK do? You know he'd tap that ass."

Probably so, and this would have made for a great satire of not just politics, but teen sex movies as well. Porn stars are now almost mainstream, and, like the new family-friendly Las Vegas, seem like fertile satirical terrority. But The Girl Next Door insists on treating sex with virginal somberness, while still going after cheap laughs at the expense of … say it again, porn stars. Unfortunately for Luke Greenfield, The Girl Next Door will not be remembered as a cultural document, or because it has anything special to say, but because Elisha Cuthbert looks pretty hot in a thong. And we almost see her boobs a couple times.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)