Miller’s Girl (2024)

Miller’s Girl Review

Having been at a school for about twenty years, I get a kick out of movies set in schools and how they are set or written by the directors. With Miller’s Girl the writer and director are one in the same. Her name is Jade Halley Bartlett and her film is quite instructive. If that’s putting it mildly.

Mr. Miller (Martin Freeman) is an English teacher at a Tennessee high school. He used to be an author but he found himself settling when he started teaching. He gets a student who impresses him at the start of every year by reading his entire summer reading list. She isn’t your average teenager either. Her name is Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega), but she is far from sweet. Two words that best describe her would be “spit” and “fire”. She’s very intelligent for her age though, so she and Mr.Miller hit it off right away; some would say they were kindred spirits.

She and her friend Winnie (Gideon Adlon) are very popular at school. They attract attention from all the wrong people, people like teachers with wives at home but these two take pride in turning heads of their teachers as often as possible.This wouldn’t be such a problem if they didn’t dress like prostitutes on national television or talk dirty…but smart.There was this one time I saw them making out in front of everyone just because they could.They’re like queen bees around here; everybody wants to be them.

As you can tell the writer/director has done a great job with this story.She seems to think that high school girls are still like this today.Well let me tell ya, I’ve worked with plenty of them.I used to coach football and basketball back in my day.These kids aren’t trying seduce their teachers with writing assignments.They’re just trying get through school so they can go to college or get on with their lives.They want to get decent grades, interact with boys, and have fun.This movie gives girls way too much credit.Teen movies always do that but this type of stuff never happened.

The film is set in rural Tennessee but besides his wife played by Dagmara Dominczyk from Succession fame Martin Freeman is the only one who seems to have an accent.There’s even a coach in there that doesn’t sound southern.Where I come from if your film is set down South then people should talk like they’re from down South.Ortega doesn’t even try speaking with a Southern accent.I understand she’s smart but she should at least sound like where she’s from.

The accents are neither here nor there though.There’s a dream sequence that shows a story the Ortega character wrote and it had a very Telenovela feel to it. The wind was blowing her hair, she was wearing some nice expensive gown and making out with the teacher in her story. This was completely off base for the rest of the movie.It was almost funny how stupid this sequence was.I think her character reading the story based on works of Arthur Miller would’ve fit better for narration purposes.

Wednesday, and the Scream franchise as well, has been seeing a lot of good work from Jenna Ortega. I’m happy to see her expanding into other roles, but this one just didn’t seem like the right fit for her. We already know she can act. Her character’s lines are supposed to make her sound super smart, and I think it was too much. She used all these big words; no high schooler, no matter how intelligent they may be, would really talk like that. Beetlejuice 2 and Wednesday Season 2 will most likely be better than this film.

Miller’s Girl is a movie that should do well with audiences. It’s got an interesting concept behind it, not to mention some beautiful cinematography; on top of that, Lionsgate has plenty of stars they can promote the movie through. However, there seems to have been an issue in taking the concept too far – it becomes unrealistic at some point during development or filming. Realistic performances have been delivered by actors who were placed in believable situations given their characters’ circumstances throughout production . But once again we see another script where teenagers are portrayed smarter than their teachers which is simply not true because kids aren’t that smart even if they’re smart ,nor do kids want relationships with their teachers as much as this screenplay suggests yes sometimes such things happen unfortunately but still this takes it too far beyond what happens normally so now i’m stuck with this movie where everything doesn’t fit together for me because it just isn’t believable enough

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