After languishing in a series of overlooked movies that ranged from the entertaining ("Office Space") to the disposable ("Picture Perfect"), Jennifer Aniston has at last decisively broken with her "Friends" image in an independent film of satiric fire and emotional turmoil. It will no longer be possible to consider her in the same way. In "The Good Girl," she plays Justine, a desperately bored clerk at Retail Rodeo, a sub-Kmart where the customers are such sleepwalkers they don't even notice when the "Attention, Shoppers!" announcements are larded with insults and nonsense.
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Recent headlines tell of a lawsuit against Wal-Mart for forcing its employees to work unpaid overtime. Retail Rodeo is by contrast relatively benign. Management is particularly flexible with Justine's co-worker Cheryl (Zooey Deschanel), who, after getting carried away once too often on the P.A. system, is reassigned to Women's Makeovers, where she improvises dubious advice. A new makeup style is called "Cirque du Face," she tells one customer. "It's all the rage with the Frenchies." Justine, who is 30ish, is married to a house painter named Phil (John C. Reilly), who is attached vertically to the living room sofa and horizontally to his best friend, Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson). Phil and Bubba paint houses during the day and are couch potatoes at night, smoking weed and peering at the television. After a day of drudgery, Justine comes home to stoned indifference. No wonder she's intrigued by Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal), the new check-out kid, who's reading The Catcher in the Rye and tells her its hero is a victim of the world's hypocrisy.