Jersey Girl (View Askew Productions, Beverly Detroit, Miramax, 2004)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Shortly after 9 last night I ran my husband Charles and I a DVD of the 2004 film Jersey Girl, starring Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler, written and directed by Kevin Smith, best known for quirky comedy-dramas like Clerks (1994) and Mallrats (1995). Clerks won him a contract with Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s Miramax company and he was still with them when he made Jersey Girl, a quirky mix of comedy and drama in which Affleck plays Oliver “Ollie” Trinke, who does public-relations for various music stars and enjoys a highly successful life in New York City. He meets and fall in love with Gertrude “Gertie” Steiney (Jennifer Lopez); the two get married and have so much sex tigether it’s only a matter of time before Gertrude gets pregnant. Unfortunately, Gertrude opts for a natural childbirth, complications develop and he ultimately dies of an aneurysm while still on the table giving birth. This forces Ollie to move back to the town of Highland, New Jersey, where he grew up, and movie in with his father, Bart Trinke (George Carlin, one of my all-time favorite people, whose presence here really lifts this movie and makes it something special). Bart works for Highland driving a snow plow, a preposterous self-propelled contraption which Ollie compares to the Batmobile, and Ollie tries to maintain his career as a publicist and his new status as a single parent. His career as a publicist does a quick crash and burn when he loses it completely at a press conference held to introduce the young Will Smith, back when he was still known as the “Fresh Prince” and before he’d established himself as a movie star. In front of a crowd yelling, “Fresh Prince! Fresh Prince!” over and over again as Will Smith is late, Ollie goes into a diatribe about how much he hates his job and how it entails making perfectly awful people seem great. The outburst not only gets him fired but haunts him every time he tries to restart his career at another publicity firm.

Flash-forward seven years, and Ollie is restive in Highland, returning to New York for increasingly fruitless interviews at various publicity companies, where he’s remembered as the wish-fulfillment figure who did what the rest of them secretly wanted to but never dared. Ollie is reduced to helping his dad drive the snow-plow. Flash-forward seven years ago, and his daughter Gertie Trinke (Racquel Castro), whom Ollie named after her late mom, is seven years old; indeed, the very first scene of the film shows her in school as she and her classmates are asked to read their autobiographical essays before their fellow students, and the story of how Gertie came to exist and what happened to her mom is told as a flashback narrated by the girl herself. Eventually there’s a meet-cute between Ollie and Maya (Liv Tyler), a 26-year-old graduate student in psychology who’s working her way through college as a clerk at the local video store. Ollie is in there to rent a children’s movie for Gertie and a porn movie for himself. Maya points out that the adult video Ollie has picked out is actually a Bisexual one, and gives him the opportunity to exchange it for a straight one. She also asks to interview him for a research paper she’s writing for her psych class, because she’s fascinated by what kind of man rents porn with his seven-year-old daughter present. (Earlier there’s been some wince-inducing dialogue about how Ollie feels that Gertie has taken the place of her mother in his life. Maybe Kevin Smith meant this innocently, but I’ve heard too many stories of dads molesting their daughters because they reminded them of their dead or divorced mothers.)

One thing Gertie wants dad to take her to see in New York is the Broadway musical Cats, which grandpa Bart at first doesn’t realize is a show, and when Ollie explains to Gertie that Cats closed three years previously he offers to take her to any other show she wants, and she picks Sweeney Todd – much to her dad’s understandable consternation. Kevn Smith drops this in his screenwriters’ bank for later withdrawal, which happens when Gertie’s teacher announces that there’s going to be a talent show in which all the children will be allowed to perform a song from a musical. While all the other kids and their parents choose the song “Memory” form Cats, Gertie and her dad pick Sweeney Todd and the teacher announces the song they’re gping to sing from Stephen Sondheim’s score, “God, I’m Good,” as if it were a hymn. At the same time she’s relieved that at least it’s something other than “Memory,” but naturally she’s shocked when she realizes what the song is really about. Dad is unexpectedly there – he had gone into New York City for a last desperate attempt to land a P.R. job at a new firm from someone who used to work for him, Arthur Brickman (Jason Biggs), but after he runs into Will Smith (playing himself) in the office’s reception room, the two of them start talking. Naturally Will Smith doesn’t know this is the guy who dissed him in public all those years ago, and when Ollie asks him how he handles being both a major movie star and the father of three, this inspires Ollie to bail on the interview and instead head back home to Highland for his daughter’s school pageant, which is that very night. (It’s one unintended irony that Will Smith talks about letting his children visit him on the sets of his movies; later, of course, Will would start casting his son Jaden in his movies, to much derision from reviewers.)

Eventually Ollie realizes that his place is ini Highland helping his daughter grow up, and living with his dad. There are hints of sexual interest between him and Maya, who at one point offered him what she called a “mercy fuck” when he told her that, though he’s done a lot of jacking off to porn, he hasn’t actually had sex with another person since his wife died seven years before. Unfortunately, Gertie comes home unexpectedly just as the two of them are getting undressed, and her presence forces Ollie and Maya to hide in the shower, still mostly dressed, until Gertie blasts them out again by flushing the toilet (one of the film’s funnier running gags is Ollie constantly telling Gertie to flush the toilet every time she uses it), which causes the water temperature in the shower to spike up to scalding. Jersey Girl is a quite likable movie and one of Ben Affleck’s better starring vehicles; he’s had a career that practically defines “uneven,” moving from the artistic heights of Hollywoodland (2006) to the sheer garbage of his very next film, Smonin’ Aces, but he’s on his best behavior here and turns in a winning performance that’s a joy to watch.