February 26 2003

ACTOR AND SCREENWRITER Paul Schneider isn't quite ready to talk to me about his new film. Oh, he'll dish on the intricacies of crafting contemplative stories in a society of consumption, or on what he hates about the self-consciousness of most movie dialogue. But right now he's bouncing around a posh San Francisco hotel room, primed to expound on an altogether different topic, his love of heavy, heavy metal: "Have I heard Meshuggah?!? Dude, I listened to Chaosphere and the Fucking Champs every day while we were making this movie! I grew up on metal! The only reason I knew about Alexander the Great was because I owned Iron Maiden's Somewhere in Time. And you have to pick up Mastodon's albums ... they've got a song called 'Where Strides the Behemoth.' "

It's a far cry from the rather quiet, inarticulate Romeo that Schneider plays in All the Real Girls, the latest slice of poetic ruralism from director-cowriter David Gordon Green (George Washington), who's watching all of this unfold with a look of affectionate bemusement. Yet, in a way, this impromptu rant on the virtues of the molten lava-thick underground music he worships couldn't be more in sync with the movie. He delivers his soliloquy in the same nakedly sincere and, well, "real" manner that marks the duo's story of a small-town Lothario who falls headfirst into puppy love with his best friend's sister (Zooey Deschanel). After she loses her virginity to another guy, the low-rent Casanova experiences heartbreak for the first time.

"We kept seeing these films that were supposedly about our 'demographic,' supposedly about our friends, our relationships, our lives," Green explains (he and Schneider are in their mid 20s). "But a lot of them were these really clever, self-conscious commercials, just out there to sell some sort of Top 40 soundtrack. There was a void there, in terms of something we could relate to."

For most anyone who's suffered the slings and arrows of budding amour, the poignancy and intimacy of his characters' supernova infatuation should be all too recognizable. Starting off at the zero mark of a romance, Girls skirts the cinematic road most traveled – swelling strings, torrid stares – and charts a course for the small, private moments that make up the beginning stages of a relationship. We get to witness the coded glances around friends, the practiced nonchalance that hides vulnerability, and the fumbling for the perfect line. In the film's best scene, our hero makes his girlfriend turn away and then, free from her gaze, dances the running man behind her. It's ridiculous, sublime, and surprisingly moving all at once.

And it's to Schneider's and Deschanel's credit that scenes like that one, and pillow talk like "I had a dream you grew a garden on a trampoline, and I was so happy I invented peanut butter" don't require insulin shots. The balancing act between poetry and preciousness in the dialogue may strike some as precarious, but both actors manage the right mixture of guileless charm and awkwardness. The thought of other actors handling those sentiments minus the kid gloves would knock down the house of cards; just don't call Green's lines "eccentric." "What's eccentric to me," he counters, "is that these people who would be in love and full of the confused passion that goes along with that, and would know just the right things to say, like in every traditional Hollywood film. That, to me, is weird. That's not how the people I know talk."

Shot in the same dreamy, ethereal manner as George Washington and utilizing a similar modus operandi (Southern locales, nonprofessional actors, languorous shots of landscapes similar to Terrence Malick's visual template), Girls runs consistent with the molasses-sweet grace of the director's distinctly regional vision. His debut work tempted viewers to simply let all of that wide-screen transcendental Americana wash over them despite the dialogue his young characters mouthed, however. Here, guiding a story rife with tender moments of the giddy, goofy head rush that love pangs bring, that lyricism seems all too apropos.

Stumbling through Podunk boredom and the ecstasy of discovering true love, and true pain, actually does exist, All the Real Girls takes the corniest of dramas and finds divinity in the details. It's not without minor faults (both Patricia Clarkson's birthday party clown and Shea Wigham's pompadoured tough guy deserve more attention), but it's impossible to think of another movie that so beautifully captures the gossamer spell of putting your heart on the line. The open ending never makes it clear whether the couple have reconciled or gone their separate ways. For Green, however, just knowing their connection was there is intoxication enough.