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An emotionally flat motion picture that mostly squanders the endless potential it had, especially considering the themes it explores. I know this sounds like pretty negative criticism for a film that was created by a director of Steven Soderbergh's caliber, but there's no avoiding the truth: save for a few scenes, The Girlfriend Experience is a dramatically inert movie.
Every once in a while, Soderbergh takes a break from having fun with the Ocean's Eleven caper franchise, and gives us small indie films that tend to be more thought-provoking. Twenty years ago, he gave us greatness using that approach with sex, lies and videotape (which I watched again a few weeks ago, and I'm amazed at how its insights on psychosexual matters still feel so relevant). He aims to achieve equal greatness with his latest dialogue-based indie film, and while the movie's not without its moments, it misses the mark, falling way behind the 1989 film and several of Soderbergh's other cinematic efforts.
The film tells the story of a Manhattan call girl who works for one of those escort service companies. Chelsea (Sasha Grey) deals with several situations she comes across in that profession, while trying to balance that with maintaining her relationship with her boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos), who works as a trainer at a gym. There's another key part to the storyline, and it's the fact that it's set in October 2008 during the few days prior to the presidential election, and focuses on the general paranoia that there was at the time about the financial hardships the U.S. was facing, and the economic proposals that each of the two candidates was making.
The Girlfriend Experience gets off on the right foot, particularly in terms of weaving the political and financial subjects into the problems that both Chelsea and Chris face, but curiously, the movie loses sight of this, and eventually, we forget that it's set during the pre-election days because it no longer seems to have relevance to the plot. Even worse, the film's last scene makes a cheap attempt at reminding us of this, by having a character suggest to Chelsea which candidate she should vote for, and this is very clearly an instance of "Oh, crap, we forgot to have more of the political subtext during the middle chunk of the movie; let's just insert this line in the last scene."
But this would be a minor quibble if everything else in The Girlfriend Experience worked effectively, which it doesn't. Initially, the audience gets to listen to voiceovers in which we hear what Chelsea writes down in her "book" (which is a journal in which she makes note of all the details of her dates), and these voiceovers are a great way to get a glimpse into our main character. Sadly, they disappear suddenly, and instead, the film takes an awfully jarring turn by showing events out of order - it's an editing technique that has worked amazingly well in plenty of other films, but serves very little purpose in this one.
The dramatic scenes in this film that should radiate emotional power are instead dull and lifeless. Sasha Grey is a former adult film star who is making her first appearance in a non-porn movie, and it's quite clear that she was a great casting choice for this role based on her past experience, but the film just doesn't give her much room to display her range (there are several problematic scenes in which Soderbergh seems to deliberately choose NOT to show us her face, when we are actually in severe need of seeing her reaction in order to develop some form of emotional investment in the character). Chris Santos speaks his lines as if he were acting on neutral - no higher or lower levels of intensity. He merely recites, rather than controlling his voice inflections so that they reflect what his character is going through, and this brings disastrously bad results particularly during a scene in which boyfriend Chris confronts Chelsea about wanting to go away for a weekend with one of her clients.
The Girlfriend Experience does deserve credit for some moments in which its matter-of-fact approach to business-related affairs is both eerily realistic and entirely relevant to the current state of affairs, and it's also hard to ignore what a great concept for a film this is. Sadly, it's all so lackluster and frustratingly incapable of capturing emotion from its characters, that it's impossible to consider it a cinematic success. There's a scene in the movie in which we hear a guy giving Chelsea a lukewarm review of her, um, performance as an escort. I'd consider this one of the script's stronger moments, were it not for the painfully obvious scene that follows it, in which we hear someone singing the words "Everybody's a critic." Still, the words that that guy uttered in his lukewarm review of Chelsea's performance ("definitely will not show you a great time") are appropriate, because those words would fit just as easily into a review of this film.
5/10
