Escape, incidentally, is the theme of the film, as yearned for by protagonist Justine Last (Jennifer Aniston). The challenge would be to do her yearnings justice, and the film's outline has the potential to do so. Thirtyish Justine has good reason to feel trapped: married to a loutish pothead named Phil (John C. Reilly) and sentenced to a lifetime of tedious labour at the local Retail Rodeo, her youthful aspirations have been crushed under the weight of the domestic life she's settled for. But then angry young loner/writer named Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal) starts manning the cash register, and his champing at the bit mirrors her own unhappiness. Soon the two are friends, then more than friends, until they start meeting for regular trysts at a local motel. Each of them feels justified since the world seems to misunderstand them so completely, but Justine wonders: is she doing the right thing, or is she no longer the "good girl" she wants to believe she is?

Unfortunately, writer Mike White lacks the courage to take the film completely into the morally ambiguous waters where his heroine wades. White stocks the Retail Rodeo with freaks: there's a Bible-thumping security guard (played by White himself), an obnoxious busybody (Deborah Rush), and a sullen make-up abuser, Cheryl (Zooey Deschanel), who fills the store P.A. system with such bitter invective that you wonder why Justine never thought to make friends with her. This cartoon treatment also extends to Phil's pathetic sidekick Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson): despite his eventually loathsome treatment of Justine, his feelings of little worth in the face of Phil's fairy-tale marriage suggest a frustration that mirrors her own. Most of these people are just like the heroine, coping with ennui in their own way, and their reduction to one-trait-each types makes Justine's vacillation too little a challenge. As White can't help but privilege her point of view, the films veers unhappily between its higher purpose and its desire to play safe.

Things might have been salvaged had director Miguel Arteta seized on this contradiction and made visual decisions to minimize them, but he's so devoted to a bland, TV-style aesthetic that fully commits to White's bet-hedging vision. Scenes that should be impossibly painful come off soft and fuzzy; a sequence in which Bubba blackmails Justine with sex is inexplicably played for laughs, and the montage-light set-ups ensure that we can't feel the frustration of the characters. And his direction of the actors play up the stereotypes for even bigger laughs--it's clear that Nelson has been hauled out of storage to do his O Brother Where Art Thou hick routine and that the other actors have been given no direction beyond the execution of a shtick. Only Gyllenhaal manages to give us real emotion, going beyond his alienated-cool Donnie Darko persona into a pathetic antisocial. Flying solo, he belongs in another, less decorous movie.

The filmmakers have shown them capable of indecorous filmmaking in the past: in 2000's sleeper Chuck and Buck, White and Arteta created a portrait of a regressive man-child that roared off the screen in a blaze of discomfort and anguish. One can see flashes of that horror in The Good Girl's vision of doing time in nowheresville, but it's under (studio-enforced?) restraints; where the earlier film was brutal in its mercy, the latter makes less nice by not making nasty enough. Someone should confront White and Arteta with the lesson learned from the comparison: it's never good enough to be The Good Girl, because when you're bad, you're better.-Travis Hoover