'The Good Girl'

Star, mapped

CREEPY COMEDY AS indescribable as toe cheese is the gift Miguel Arteta, Mike White, and Matthew Greenfield offer the world as director, screenwriter, and producer, respectively. With Chuck and Buck, White penciled himself into a role no other actor could have possibly inhabited: a man on the verge of boyhood, whose suck of an eternal lollipop feels perverse enough to give the film an "under FBI surveillance" rating, yet whose earnest love for his fully mature childhood buddy bursts the film beyond the brutality of its caricature. Arteta's directorial debut, Star Maps, with Greenfield as producer and White in a tiny role, merged teen prostitutes in Hollywood's underworld into the melodramatic fast-lane of the telenovela. They've moved the operation uptown this time around, and Jennifer Aniston stars – a little aggressively – in another Arteta film about unhealthy obsession in which Emma Bovary and Holden Caulfield meet behind cashier terminals in a downscale department store. Aniston, too studied in her dead-end mannerisms, plays a wife who feels, probably unfairly, imprisoned in her marriage to kind if potheaded painter husband Phil (an always awesome John C. Reilly). She looks to aisle two for spiritual relief in the form of a tormented soul, a faux writer who's renamed himself, deeply, "Holden" (played by angst expert Jake Gyllenhaal). Their romance goes predictably awry, in a typically unpredictable Arteta way. Yet it's the bit parts that bring the real laughs in this film – from Fargo hubby John Carroll Lynch, "Your Store Manager," to Phil's bony painting partner Tim Blake Nelson. If you, unlike me, can reduce Aniston to the anonymity of her surroundings – accomplishing the inhuman feat of removing all knowledge of her soul-mating to Brad Pitt and familiarity with a certain popular TV comedy about a group of "buddies" – then you may truly be able to inhabit the film's brilliant comic nowhereland. I had to protect my eyes: her star power was shining far too neon bright in a movie where some all-purpose fluorescence was truly required. (Susan Gerhard)