The Dead Girl

At its core, The Dead Girl is about how the people we love the most will sometimes forget to love us back while they are nursing their own grief, failures, obsessions, and oblivion. And, oh, how hard it is to fall out of love with someone for being all too human. So we continue to let ourselves be defined by the measure with which we are loved until something jolts us into action, awakens us, and we find a better way to live. For four women in this film, the death of one girl acts as this impetus, and we watch as the characters unburden themselves in an effort to seek a life they can bear.

The film is divided into five interconnected episodes. Arden, played by Toni Collette, cares for a verbally abusive and ailing mother, a mother who has forgotten to love her daughter because she is grieving her own mortality. However, even very critical mothers are a common enough occurrence, and rest homes are always a viable option. Therefore, at the end of the day, it appears Collette´s character just needs a little local fame and to get seriously laid. When she accepts a date with a grocery store bag boy ( Giovanni Ribisi ), we are hopeful if a little wary. Ribisi´s character offers to accept Arden´s flaws because he obviously accepts his own, and sometimes that is enough to move mountains.

When Leah, played by sweet-faced Rose Byrne, performs an autopsy on a young woman she believes to be her sister that went missing fifteen years ago, closure feels within her grasp. She pleads with her mother to have a memorial service. During this exchange, there is no doubt that the character desperately needs this closure in order to live a complete life. However, her mother refuses, believing in every ounce of her being that she would innately know if her daughter had died. Therefore, Leah must take it upon herself to seek peace, and either she will fail or succeed. And we hope, because she is young and smart and beautiful, that she does.

I could not think of a better actress to play the mother of the murdered girl than Marcia Gay Harden. There is something that Harden can bring to a character that allows us to feel a little contempt while fully recognizing that we could probably do no better under similar circumstances. In the episode that tells her story, we are shown that mothers are just as blind as anyone else because they are as human as anyone else. It is sometimes difficult for a child to accept this fact, but it is also difficult for mother´s themselves to accept. When being unaware of your child´s difficulties directly leads them to run away and lead a dangerous life, to question whether or not the universe was right to give us children is a heartbreaking reflex.

When I worked at Barnes and Noble, this customer who had been married for fifty years told me that marriages were hardly ever 50-50 transactions all the time. "Sometimes," she said, "it's 90-10, and you've gotta be okay with that." The episode filled with the most surprises is "The Wife," surprises I will not give away here. I will only say that I could imagine The Wife (Mary Beth Hurt) telling me this very thing. Perhaps she would be more bitter than the happy woman at Barnes and Noble, but she would say these things to me and mean it with every part of her.

Brittany Murphy, in her best performance, plays a girl who has undoubtedly made many mistakes. There are people who have suffered greatly and still manage to avoid drugs and prostitution. However, she loves better than anyone else in the film. Even still, love for her daughter does not save her from a horrendous ending. The film can appear bleak, but truthfully, an underlying hope exists in almost every moment, with the exception of the moments where The Wife appears on screen. The women the film follows have a chance to make their life better by giving or receiving love. And just one moment of acceptance, one glimpse of a love that might be, can propel change for the better. Love definitely does not save. But it makes life a whole lot fucking better.