Entertainment

‘The Girl’ review

‘the Girl” wants to be eat-your-vegetables cinema, but vegetables are good for you. This misery fest is more like an eat-your-bark movie.

Abbie Cornish gets her Texas on as a trailer-trash mom near the Mexican border whose negligence has caused authorities to place her child in foster care. Needing money to get back on her feet, she takes the advice of her cynical trucker dad (Will Patton) and becomes a “coyote” helping Mexicans sneak across the border. Except she botches things and finds herself saddled with a Mexican girl whose mother has gone missing, possibly drowned.

Get it? She lost one kid, but she won’t make that mistake again. “The Girl,” which is not to be confused with the recent HBO movie of the same name, which is about Alfred Hitchcock, is yet another example of a carpetbagger film. These condescending, unconvincing efforts are made by bicoastal types hoping to win awards (from one another) for the accomplishment of portraying poor rural types down South as figurines acting out dull quasi-political insights (illegal immigrants are people, too; poverty is hard, etc.).

If the poor really interested such filmmakers, these movies would have something to offer other than lugubriousness masquerading as seriousness, and clichés presented as hard truths.