Even Jenna Ortega Isn’t Enough to Save 'Miller’s Girl' from a Bad Trope

When I heard about the new movie Miller’s Girl, my initial reaction was, We’re still making these?

The story of a clever, cunning, desirable teenage girl wrapping a middle-aged man around her little finger and sending him down a life-destroying path was a major plot in the 1990s: Poison Ivy, The Crush, Wild Things. Alyssa Milano starred in a bunch of straight-to-video flicks. There was even one in the mid-aughts, Pretty Persuasion, where Evan Rachel Wood was the manipulative nymphet.

Maybe it’s because erotic thrillers have been making a comeback of sorts (as my colleague Kayla McCulloch summarized in a recent review) that Lionsgate greenlit this tale of forbidden seduction. However, since we’re also living in a time when people know what “grooming” means (and have zero tolerance for anyone who’s caught doing that shit), a movie about a middle-aged man succumbing to a tempestuous teen just may be the wrong thing to drop in theaters — even if the teen is played by the in-demand Jenna Ortega.

Yes, the new Wednesday Addams plays the absurdly named Cairo Sweet, a highly intelligent 18-year-old who lives alone in a big mansion (her parents are always away) and longs to be a provocative writer. She finds a mentor in Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman), her high school English teacher. Dude is immediately won over by this well-read, wise-beyond-her-years youngin’, especially when he finds out she’s been reading the only book he ever published, a collection of short stories. 

Screenwriter Jade Halley Bartlett (who originally was hired to write the Doctor Strange sequel before she was dismissed) uses her directorial debut to kill two birds with one stone, making both a salacious, Southern-fried hothouse drama and an almost-obnoxiously erudite commentary on gender power dynamics. Bartlett has said in interviews that the script started out as a play, and it so shows. The dialogue is Aaron Sorkin-style wordy, while many of the scenes, especially between Freeman and Ortega, are staged like a hot-and-bothered version of David Mamet’s sexual harassment study Oleanna. Also, the movie is set in Tennessee (it was really filmed in Georgia, of course), which means that most of the cast talk like they’re cats on a hot tin roof. This includes Miller’s wife (​​Dagmara Dominczyk), a boozy, foul-mouthed workaholic who’s amused (and slightly turned on) that her husband has a groupie; and Sweet’s BFF (Gideon Adlon, King of the Hill actress Pamela Adlon’s daughter), a “lesbian” who still wants to get deflowered by Miller’s baseball coach buddy (Sherman’s Showcase/South Side co-creator/star Bashir Salahuddin). 

It’s kinda wild watching Freeman, that sardonic, nebbishy Brit from the original The Office, play a so-called Southern gent who tries (and fails) not to fall for the flirty, feminine wiles of Ortega’s scintillating sociopath. When Sweet writes an insanely filthy, Henry Miller-esque short story, the guy has no choice but to go to his office/shed and rub one out. Yeah, that’s some creepy shit. And although Ortega gives it her all as an adolescent who’s more intelligent than emotionally stable (the tearful, vindictive, one-take dressing-down her character gives Miller after he rejects her and her short story could very well be the best piece of acting she’s done so far in her young career), the movie doesn’t know whether to make her savvy and self-aware or deranged and straight-up damaged.  

Even when it oozes with extraness, Miller’s Girl is an erotic thriller that isn’t that erotic or thrilling. Bartlett seems almost too afraid to actually take that leap and make everyone in this awkward-ass yarn slide into the amoral abyss. Miller may be a horny egomaniac and Sweet may be just fucked up in the head, but Bartlett sees them as sad, lonely kindred spirits secretly looking for affection and admiration. 

To be honest, watching a story of May-December sordidness just feels icky at this point in time. Before I saw this, I caught part two of Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story, the Netflix docuseries about a revered, British celeb who spent most of his career sexually assaulting children, practically going to his grave without being punished for his crimes. Seeing randy, older guys and coquettish, younger girls do the will-they-or-won’t-they dance may have been entertainingly naughty 30 years ago. But in this post-#MeToo era, Miller’s Girl is just another reminder that men will always be ready to risk it all for a pretty, young thang.