by Robert Bouffard, Editor
As someone who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian setting, movies deconstructing those settings are always interesting to me. Writer/director Laurel Parmet’s feature debut, The Starling Girl, does just that through the lens of a coming-of-age movie. It follows 17-year-old Jem Starling (Eliza Scanlen), who wants to love and serve God within the strictures of her fundamentalist church. But when the church’s 20-something youth pastor, Owen (Lewis Pullman), returns from his mission trip to Puerto Rico, a whole new world and way of thinking is opened up to Jem. She develops her first real crush, as well as “forbidden” sexual feelings, but her outlet for these feelings is disastrous.
Now, this isn’t just a movie about someone leaving the restrictive community they were raised in — it’s about the imbalances of power that allow those communities to thrive, while simultaneously repressing the community members. Jem isn’t the only one who has a little crush — Owen orchestrates a lot of the encounters the two have — and her dad (Jimmi Simpson), one of the main people she wants to talk to about her struggles, is grappling with his own repression in an unfortunately underserved storyline. At the same time, Jem’s mom (Wrenn Schmidt) is toxic and controlling, the boy who likes her is a bit twisted, the church’s lead pastor is manipulative, Owen’s wife (oh yeah, he’s married) is willingly conformist, and God himself is either silent or lying — Jem can’t figure out which.
Jem doesn’t explicitly know that she wants to be free of this atmosphere, but based on her words and actions, that subconscious desire is there. All she really wants to do is lead the church’s girls’ dance troupe, but she’s told from just about every angle that she’s making the dances too much about herself and not enough about God. Even though she wants to follow God, she’s frustrated with a church environment that doesn’t let her express herself, which is an all-too-familiar idea in the modern Evangelical deconstructionist movement.
It’s hard for Jem to reconcile the idea that God wants her to be herself with how everyone around her seems to be holding that back. And that’s where Owen comes in, telling her that he and his wife were never actually meant to be together, and that God wants him and Jem to be together instead. Classic predatory grooming behavior. Scanlen and Pullman are perfect for these central roles. The staunch, reliable Scanlen brings an assured performance to a tricky role that needs to be handled with care, and the same goes for Pullman, who is almost unrecognizable from last year’s Top Gun: Maverick in both appearance and demeanor.
Parmet uses these two performers, along with the rest of the committed cast, to bring a tone out of the fundamentalist atmosphere that you can only really know or convey honestly if you’ve spent extended time within it; I know that, because I have. When you’re critiquing a group of people that’s an easy target like this one unfortunately is, it’s easy to devolve into just making a hit piece. But Parmet is balanced in her writing and assured in her direction. The movie is sympathetic to the fundamentalists, while still unflinchingly holding just about every character accountable for their wrongs: Parmet deftly toes this line, and places the true blame on fundamentalism at its core just a bit more than the people trapped in it.
The main issue with The Starling Girl is that it wraps up perhaps too neatly. After almost two hours of despicable behavior from Owen, and the not-so-subtly self-aggrandizing conduct of all of the other adults, there’s too tidy of a bow placed on the ending. In the context of the rest of the movie, it doesn’t fully feel emotionally honest. Jem is taken advantage of by just about everyone at just about every turn, but there’s something even deeper and more sinister at work that’s kind of hand-waved in favor of the kind of coming-of-age movie we’ve come to expect. But ultimately, the conclusion doesn’t detract from the body of the film, a worthwhile treatment of a poignant topic viewed through an insightful lens.
Rating: Liked It
The Starling Girl is currently available on VOD
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