Very Good Girls (2013)

This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

A British film critic always used to say that French cinema effortlessly produce movies examining the mores of middle class family life which can be introspective, insightful and amusing. Everyone else struggles to repeat this.Very Good Girls stars Elizabeth Olsen and Dakota Fanning as two middle class New Yorkers who want to lose their virginity during their last summer before embarking on their college years.Olsen's parents seem to be outgoing and more and they are played by Richard Dreyfuss and Demi Moore. Fanning's parents are a little more reserved but there is also friction as their dad has been caught cheating. Ellen Barkin plays the brittle mum and Clark Gregg takes time out from superhero movies.Both girls fall for an ice cream seller in Brighton Beach and budding artist/photographer played by Boyd Holbrook. Fanning makes out with him but later cools off and pushes him towards Olsen when Olsen faces a sudden family crisis. Fanning then has an older, predatory love interest.The film has a female writer and director but you would not actually think that if you see the film. There is nothing interesting about these two teenage girls, I did not like them or cared much about them. The two set of parents were more interesting but they were broadly drawn and wasted with what amounted as cameos.The story is not strong, interesting, edgy or even focused. It wants to be a continental European coming of age drama and fails.

First-time directors don't typically draw a cast with this much potential and talent. For Very Good Girls, Naomi Foner has managed to snag two of the hottest young actresses in the business right now - Dakota Fanning and Elizabeth Olsen - and surrounded them with the likes of Richard Dreyfuss, Demi Moore, Ellen Barkin and Clark Gregg. The more cynical among us would put this casting coup down to Foner's Hollywood connections: she's penned a few screenplays in her time, but is best known as the mother of thespian siblings Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal. It's a shame that the final product doesn't dispel these suspicions. The film's awkward love/lust triangle never really convinces, and Very Good Girls spends most of its running time meandering aimlessly through the lives of characters who remain stubbornly opaque and unlikeable.Lilly (Fanning) and Gerry (Olsen) are best friends who've grown up together, taking refuge in each other's houses when life gets too complicated in their own homes. It's their final summer together, and both girls make a pact to lose their virginity before Lilly goes off to college. Enter David (Boyd Holbrook), an artist who enchants both girls with his good looks and charm. As Gerry develops an outsized crush on David, Lilly plunges into a relationship with him - one that she awkwardly keeps a secret from her best friend. When tragedy strikes, Lilly is overcome by guilt, and the life-long friendship that binds the two girls together is sorely tested.The trouble with Very Good Girls is that it's built around a tired old trope - two girls fight and fall out over the love of one guy - but fails to find anything refreshing to say about it. Foner's screenplay, for all that it's written by a woman, gives little to no real insight into either girl. Lilly, in particular, feels like a hollow shell drifting through the paces of her narrative, never really connecting with either David or her sketchy, amorous boss Fitzsimmons (Peter Sarsgaard - Foner's son-in-law). It doesn't help that David, as played by the stoically colourless Holbrook, is a walking cliché - in a scene meant to pass for deeply romantic, he actually makes Lilly read him poetry by Sylvia Plath in his dingy artist's loft.Far more interesting are the home lives Foner has constructed around the two girls. Lilly struggles to come to terms with her father Edward (Gregg) cheating on her uptight mother Norma (Barkin), and migrates to Gerry's considerably more cheery, argumentative home, presided over by the loving but loud Danny (Dreyfuss) and Kate (Moore). There's so much more here to be explored: the way the two families intersect, and how these connections feed into the girls' friendship, lives and personalities. Unfortunately, Foner shoves it all into the background, focusing instead on the unfortunate love/lust triangle that's sprung up around Lilly, Gerry and David.Foner's cast is, at least, worth the watch, although they don't quite manage to completely salvage the film or their characters. Fanning plays Lilly as tremulously lost, and Olsen lends her own charms to an otherwise paper-thin character who feels more like a plot device than a person. Barkin comes off best out of the entire adult cast, unearthing a little of the sorrow that haunts a woman whose husband has been conducting an affair in their own home.It should come as no surprise to anyone who watches Very Good Girls that the movie was written twenty years ago. In many ways, the film feels hopelessly outdated. Foner makes minor edits to the script to update it to the present, which largely involve Lilly never charging her mobile phone so that she can only be contacted on a landline. But, in the larger scheme of things, the film seems out of touch with the girls of its title, miring them in adolescent angst over the same boy while failing to make them stand on their own as characters.

"I just wanted to make you feel better. You liked him so much." Lilly (Fanning) and Gerri (Olsen) have been best friends for years and have just graduated high school. Both are on their way to college and neither want to go there as virgins. They decide to make a pact with each other that they will both lose it before they leave. Things are going along fine until they meet and start to like the same boy. This is a plot that has been done to death. Usually though the movie is a comedy and this is a drama. The one thing this does have going for it that the others don't is great actors. The acting alone is enough to keep this from becoming too cheesy or cookie-cutter like. The movie is very predictable and again is something you have seen a hundred times but Fanning and Olsen together are a great team. There are moments that make you cry and make you angry but overall this is a movie that will give you a good feeling. Overall a movie that who's plot has been done to death but the acting makes it feel fresh. A very good coming of age movie that teen girls should watch to show what is really important in life. I give this a high B+.

Very Good Girls is a coming of age story that touches on friendship, family, love and discovering when it's okay to indulge in yourself. Nothing new there, amIright? The mood is set fairly early on, kicking off the 'best friends forever' feel.Elizabeth Olsen and Dakota Fanning have great chemistry, and there is nothing stopping you from believing that they truly are best friends, which really plays into the story when you witness a 'betrayal' of some kind. Although you fall in love with the sweetness of the romance that blossoms you cannot help but 'tisk, tisk' at the surreptitious actions of this 'friend.'The movie keeps your attention all throughout it although you're not sure what you want to come of the story. The build up to the ending is perfectly paced and the performances are spectacular. Dakota Fanning delivers yet again and Elizabeth Olsen is letting it known that she is an actress to reckon with. 7.4/10