I must say, 2013 is getting off to a really inauspicious start at the movies. It’s not just that nothing good has been released. These moves are so bad this year, I can barely find anything I’m even interested in seeing. But I got taken in by the fabulous trailer for Ginger and Rosa, which masterfully hides all the shortcomings of this boring and unsatisfying film (yet again, a trailer is a better “movie” than the movie it’s advertising.) So my wife and I headed to Angelika on a week night to give this film a chance. What a mistake.

I am so tired of these pretentious indie films with no dialog, no character development, no thematic development, ill-chosen and over-burdened soundtracks, and no ending. Every character in this film is an abstract mystery-person (with the partial exception of the father.) The central relationship between the two friends is basically undeveloped. The relationship between Elle Fanning and her mother is sketched minimally, but to little narrative effect. And the two gay guys and their weird friend are so undeveloped I couldn’t even tell you with any certainly who they were. As for the “political content,” it is non-existent. They do mention nukes and the Cuban Missile Crisis every now and then, but no one says anything the slightest bit interesting, and these concepts never relate to the central story in any meaningful way. All we get is Elle Fanning saying “the world’s gonna end,” over and over, and writing really bad poetry on the subject. Seriously, this whole aspect of the story (which was so emphasized in the trailer) is nugatory.

Which leaves us with the main plot: Elle Fanning’s father Roland starts fucking her best friend. In my opinion, this whole storyline completely backfired, because Roland was the only person in the film I liked. He was the only one who seemed remotely interesting or remotely real, and Alessandro Nivola at least brought a little warmth into this ice-fest. He also gives a pretty good performance, and has all of the (very few) good lines in the movie. It’s weird: the emotions and feelings of the girls are never explored, but Roland’s emotions and feelings are explored a little, and again this makes his character automatically more sympathetic. Anyway, since the filmmakers left this all so open, I feel totally free to enjoy the fact that his character finally found love with a teenager, providing him with a happiness which long evaded him.

My wife and I were discussing Elle and Dakota Fanning afterward. I think they are each in their own way a semi-irritating bundle of tics, but that Elle has superior warmth and emotional range, and thus more potential as an actress. With material this bad it’s hard to give an opinion on her performance in this film, but she does do some nice crying, and she does imbue selected moments of the film with a pleasant naturalness. The rest of this star-studded cast is embarrassingly under-utilized; in fact, I can’t even imagine how they got all these stars to appear in this terrible movie. 

After this film, my wife and I felt so emotionally and intellectually deprived, we went home and streamed (as a kind of novocaine) the pilot to an old TV comedy we never saw: Arrested Development (2003.) Comparing that pilot episode to Ginger and Rosa, I can report that the 30 minute pilot had superior character development, superior emotional content, superior dialog, superior socio-political content, and it accomplished all these things in one-third the run time of Ginger and Rosa.

Let’s hope 2013 gets turned around soon.