From the mind of Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian fame, God Help the Girl is about a woman forming a band because she believed it would help with her mental health, but then ultimately abandons the project to go to college because she thinks it is the adult thing to do.
That’s it. That’s the whole 2 hour movie.
Ok, maybe that’s not fair.
The main character, Eve, is staying in a medical rehabilitation facility in order to help her cope with her anorexia. She breaks out of the building to see a random band play, and meets James, an aspiring musician. She convinces him, and his friend Cassie, to start a band with her. They agree to follow her musical direction, but disagree on the scope of the project. James is content with creating music he likes without achieving fame, and Eve wants everyone to hear her music. Cassie has no personality other than being a space cadet.
While working toward their first show, Eve runs out of her medication, but convinces herself that a lifestyle change would be enough to save her from depression. She also heavily leans on James for emotional support, and when he is not around to help her, she spirals further into her own psychosis. James ultimately takes her back to the medical facility, where she begins to take care of herself again and starts working on the songs for their upcoming show.
Eve confesses to James she will be leaving the city to attend college, because she doesn’t think hanging around with him or Cassie will provide the structure she needs in her life. She dyes her hair blonde, they play their one and only show, and then James escorts Eve to the train station where she heads off to start her new life. If that feels like an abrupt change of character direction, that’s because it is.
The tone of the movie is kind of all over the place. It tries much too hard to be funny, and a lot of the jokes just didn’t land for me. In the first 10 minutes, they show Eve reading a fake newspaper denoting how smart she is, a fight between James and his drummer on stage where they both take their glasses off before they go at it, James slapping the drummer, and then James just being so fucking awkward at being a lifeguard.
I didn’t laugh at any of this, because I still wasn’t sure what this movie was trying to be. We don’t know where Eve has snuck out of, why she decided to go to this show to see James play, and why she seems sick. Once I understood what the premise of the movie was, probably around the time Eve tracks down James at the pool and asks to live with him, that I was able to relax and roll with the punches. I laughed out loud when James said he had “the constitution of an abandoned rabbit”, and the fact they used an old dog to Lassie-style summon Cassie to the dance was so ridiculous that I loved it. The characters were endearing, and I found myself enjoying how they interacted with each other, and how innocent all their conversations seemed. It was in stark contrast to the reality of Eve’s situation.
That being said, while the characters are likable, the movie doesn’t spend much time fleshing them out. Cassie wants to sing without putting in any work understanding music theory. James is an awkward, grumpy artist who plays music because he enjoys it. Eve is depressed, but wants to create music and have it heard by everyone. She’s the main character of this movie, and the songs are written from her perspective, but I feel like I understand her the least.
We’re not shown the circumstances of how Eve ended up in the facility, other than her life “was a nightmare” and she stopped taking care of herself. This information, in itself, isn’t integral to the plot, but it might help explain what she is triggered by. They purposely keep the details of her background vague, but then expect you to understand why she feels like she needs to start completely over to get better, even though she just tried it and it didn’t work. She rationalizes to James “being around people who act like adults” would help her, but it never once was mentioned or insinuated before that she thinks James is infantile or his lack of ambition is holding her back. In fact, he was the one taking care of her when she couldn’t take care of herself, which makes this statement even more bizarre.
All this to say, the ending of the movie feels abrupt and unsatisfying. It’s almost 2 hours long, and they spent so much time on 2 romantic subplots that don’t go anywhere when they should have provided character development for Eve and James so they didn’t feel so hollow.
While the plot of the movie left a lot to be desired, I did find the musical numbers fairly enjoyable. I hadn’t had much exposure to Belle and Sebastian before – the only song I know of theirs is on the Juno soundtrack. Still, I was excited to see how this movie incorporated the songs. Would it go full-musical and have the characters sing their thoughts and feelings directly at the camera? Would it be more like Once where the songs are band performances? Would it just play the songs in the background as narration? Turns out, it was a little bit of everything.
The first musical number Eve sings directly to the camera while the world around her changes based on her fantasy of the kind of person she’s pretending to be. I was sold – characters breaking the 4th wall in order to belt out emotions is right in my wheelhouse.
My favorite number, “The Psychiatrist Is In”, is similar in this regard. It does a great job at communicating Eve’s past to James without overtly stating it, and showing how smitten James is with her and her writing talent. I also loved Eve’s voice and thought it suited the songs really well (unlike Cassie’s, which… oof).
The band performances were also charming, and I appreciated the understated choreography. It fit the vibe well, because while nothing is overtly energetic, the songs are fun, playful, and sometimes gawky, and it was refreshing to see that in how they moved their bodies.
What I did find fairly strange was the way things were shot so literally, as to squash any ambiguity as to what is going on in the song. I discovered that Stuart Murdoch’s writing style is very much of the musical narration variety. It’s like as if he opened up a book and started singing the pages out loud. I think this can work well when you’re just listening to the music, but this movie showed everything that was happening. Eve’s singing about reading a newspaper? She’s reading a newspaper. Eve asks James to lay down on her couch, and he lays down on her couch. James sings about wanting to bathe Eve, and they show him bathing Eve. Eve says Cassie dances like a kangaroo, and Cassie dances like a kangaroo. I pretty much rolled my eyes when the trio writes their first song together, and when Cassie doesn’t know what to write the song about, Eve asks, “What have you done today?”. And then they write about seeing a dog, because she had literally seen a dog earlier that day. It got fairly exhausting after a while. It reminded me of that Family Guy Randy Newman sketch, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, shuffle to the left…
While this movie isn’t perfect, it had a lot of promise. If it included more character development and less montages, heavy handed visual representation of the songs, and whatever the hell the Anton thing was, I feel like I would have enjoyed it more.
On to Were the World Mine…