For a movie that definitely takes an unflattering, disapproving point of view of fundamentalist Christian communities, Laurel Parmet‘s The Starling Girl exhibits a level of warmth, compassion and understanding toward its characters that makes the story all the more engrossing. Parmet doesn’t sit in judgement, looking at this world from the outside in. Instead, she invites us to live in it alongside her characters. When teenaged Jem (Eliza Scanlen), for instance, is encouraged to betroth herself to the pastor’s son, she has no way of knowing how fucked up that is. And thus Parmet does not instruct us to be horrified. She lets the events speak for themselves as we experience them through Jem’s eyes.
Piety, in this community, is expressed through, among other things, austerity. Adornment of any kind is discouraged as vanity; calling attention to oneself would suggest pride. Even at nearly eighteen years old, Jem’s ears have not been pierced. From this, Parmet and cinematographer Brian Lannin (2014’s Fort Tilden) take the inspiration to always favor naturalism. Every light source, even if slightly sweetened, is motivated and never oversaturated.
Scanlen displays a remarkable subtlety in her performance–a welcome surprise for those of us who know her from good but decidedly unsubtle movies like The Devil All the Time and Old–that helps us place ourselves in her shoes. When Lewis Pullman–also giving a drastically different performance from his impressive comedic one in Top Gun: Maverick–shows up as the pastor’s other, older son who has returned from a lengthy missionary trip with his wife and immediately takes an inappropriate amount of interest in Jem, Parmet allows us to view him as Jem does, a gentle, handsome man who offers a new, less restrictive interpretation of biblical teachings.
The movie doesn’t have to go out of its way to tell us that he’s really a pathetic, loathsome creep. Jem is too sheltered to see that his view of her is paternalistic, condescending and self-serving. What she does know is that someone is taking an interest in her that’s not about whether the clothes she’s picked out are sufficiently modest to please the Lord. She likes to dance and, for once, someone is not treating her creative, self-expressive interests with suspicion.
From the very first scene, we are made to understand how important it is in this community to present oneself as pure. The result for those who don’t is humiliating faux-concern from the church’s standard bearers. The Starling Girl‘s most direct criticism of these fundamentalists is that they are far less concerned with living according to Christian teaching and philosophy than with appearing to do so in a kind of ongoing intracommunity competition. Lying and keeping secrets, we come to find out, are not exactly discouraged when they’re done in the service of burnishing the group representation.
“She’d kill me,” Jem says of her mother about the prospect of returning home after curfew, knowing instinctively that parental judgement is a bigger threat than divine judgement. Later, when Jem hesitates to go along with the lie that her father’s (Jimmi Simpson) overdose was accidental, that same mother screams at her to “stop being selfish.” You see, moral conviction crumbles in the face of group self-preservation. The StarlingGirl‘s ultimate condemnation of the milieu it depicts is one usually reserved for left wing, secular ideas like communism and socialism. It crushes the individual.
