VERY GOOD GIRLS

Best friends Lily and Gerri are determined to lose their virginity during their last summer together before they leave home for College. The drag is that there is evidently only one decent looking potential candidate to perform this service in Brighton Beach, and they both fall for him.  The object of their affections is David a hunky ice cream salesman & budding photographer who is thirty-something and way too old for either of the girls in reality. However Gerri announces that she is smitten the moment the two girls run into him on the Boardwalk, but it is the slightly aloof Lily that catches his eye.

Lily whilst looking no older than 12 years old acts like someone twice her age as she tries to manipulate her parents as they decide to separate after she catches her psychiatrist father making out with a patient, which is no real surprise given that her mother, also a therapist, is an uptight rather mean control freak. Gerri on the other hand lives with her free-spirited liberal hippyish parents who insist on talking about sex at the dinner table as if they were always at it with each other and others too. Both girls despise the fact that despite their wish to be different, they are actually very much like their own parents.

Lily has a secret affair with David and does in fact 'give it up to him' whereas Gerri who has decided to stalk him instead, talks about him to Lily at every opportunity, but she still remains 'in tact' even when the summer is out.  In this very lame and predictable plot it is inevitable that when Gerri eventually discovers that her best friend has been having this covert affair with the man she thought wanted to date her, there is a big fight.   

They kiss and make up in the end, as do Lily's parents too, and for some inexplicable reason the girls feel a need to celebrate by stripping (almost) naked together in their Long Island driveway after David has escaped to Paris.

There is not a lot in this tepid drama to redeem itself as writer Naomi Foner in her directing debut has made many spurious bad calls asides from her script. Lily was played by Dakota Fanning and Gerri by Elizabeth Olsen who did her best with her part but at 24 (6 years older than Ms Fanning) was just too old.  But then again Ellen Burstyn playing Lily's mother looked an odd match with Clark Gregg playing her husband as he is a good 8 years younger.  Ms Foner also had the benefit of having Richard Dreyfus, Demi Moore and Peter Sarsgaard but gave them nothing to get their teeth into. (Sarsgaard is actually her son-in-law as he is married to her daughter Maggie Gyllenhaal).

Very Good Girls is at best a Very Poor Film.

★★★