Sundance 2016 – White Girl

Let me give you a little insight into my festival life.  When I am at the Sundance Film Festival, sleep is a very rare, but treasured thing.  I think throughout the festival, I average four hours of sleep a night.  I volunteer until around 2:00am every night and occasionally party until the sun rises.  Movies here start screening as early as 8:30am, which means for me to get to a screening and get a ticket, I have to be up as early as 5:45 or 6:00am.  So you can probably imagine that when a movie at that time in the morning isn’t exciting, I tend to doze off.

I saw White Girl at 8:30am and let me tell you, this is an impossible movie to fall asleep in.  White Girl is an insane, kinetic, shocking, familiar movie, that will have your jaw on the floor.

The white girl in question is Leah (Morgan Saylor), a college girl who falls hard for her drug dealing neighbor Blue (Brian Marc).  When Blue gets arrested, Leah goes to extreme measures to get him out of jail.

This movie is mildly inspired by writer/director Elizabeth Wood’s life, which is horrifying.  This movie has as much cocaine in it as The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).  Leah, who was a partier before she met Blue, descends into a cocaine fueled mayhem when he goes to jail.  She will do anything and everything to get Blue out, including selling cocaine and having sex with a number of people to get help moving the product.  It is fascinating to watch her go to extreme lengths for the man, but becomes mildly redundant and cliche towards the end, as we can predict certain actions before they happen.

What Wood does do well is blur the line of Leah’s motivation.  We initially think she is doing this out love for Blue.  But as the movie goes on and and the partying goes longer and harder, Leah gets lost in this world and seems to like to do these things for the sake of doing it.  In one scene, Blue tells Leah that he loves her, and her reaction is one of surprise rather than happiness.  You can debate whether Leah was doing the things she was doing for love, or because she is a mess and loves the lifestyle.

Great performances all around from the whole cast.  Saylor really goes all out and gives a barebones performance as Leah.  Marc adds depth to Blue, straying away from a stereotypical drug dealer to somebody we root for.  Justin Bartha is the right amount of scumbag as Leah’s cocaine addicted boss Kelly.  And the usually funny Adrian Martinez is scary good as Blue’s supplier.

Though the plot is a darker and grittier version of Half Baked (1998), White Girl is one of the best and jaw-dropping movies of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.  Wood takes us on a New York nightmare love story of sex, drugs, and partying.  It is one of those movies that will forever be imbedded in my mind for the rest of 2016.

MY RATING – 3.5/4

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