Film Appreciation - 'Cause I've Built My Life Around You

Cody Hamman has Film Appreciation for Kevin Smith's underappreciated 2004 film Jersey Girl.

After his interconnected View Askewniverse films Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, and Dogma built up to the crossover blow-out Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, writer/director Kevin Smith was ready to move on to making films that didn't connect to his other work and wouldn't feature the characters Jay and Silent Bob. His first movie outside the Askewniverse was Jersey Girl... and sadly, it has been the butt of many jokes, many of them told by Smith himself, in the fifteen years since its release. That reputation of being a joke seems to overshadow the merits the film has as a heartfelt drama.

Jersey Girl had bad luck from the start. Smith's frequent collaborator Ben Affleck had become a major star in the years since they started working together, and had fallen in love with another major star, Jennifer Lopez, who Smith chose to cast alongside Affleck in their new film. This caused trouble because Affleck and Lopez's relationship got so much press in the tabloids that it ignited a backlash against them, and it didn't help that they started working on Jersey Girl right after working together on Gigli, a movie that was considered a total disaster. Smith could have saved his movie some negative press if he had just cast someone else as Affleck's initial love interest. But I wouldn't trade out Lopez's presence in this movie, because if her character was played by someone else we probably wouldn't have gotten Raquel Castro as the titular Jersey girl, and Castro is the heart of the movie.

Jersey Girl is a film about a father and his young daughter, inspired by the fact that Smith had a toddler daughter himself when he was writing and making this movie. I suppose this is why the film wasn't warmly embraced by some people who were familiar with Smith's previous work when it came out; not everyone who loved the vulgar, R-rated films he had made before would be interested in a sappy PG-13 movie about a dad and his little kid. I was supportive of the idea from the start, and I'm glad to have this softer, more accessible entry in Smith's filmography. Because of the rating and subject matter, Jersey Girl is the one time I was ever able to share my Kevin Smith fandom with my paternal grandmother. She couldn't stand vulgarity, but I watched Jersey Girl with her and she enjoyed it. I appreciate it for that.

We meet Affleck's character Ollie Trinke in December of 1994, when he's living the high society life of a music publicist and dating a book editor named Gertrude, Lopez's character. They get married, soon Gertrude has become pregnant, she goes into labor, and tragically dies of an aneurysm during childbirth. All of this happens within the first 15 minutes. Jersey Girl runs 102 minutes, but there was a longer cut that was 135 minutes. I've never seen it, it has never been released, but I know Gertrude is a substantial part of those missing minutes. Audience members were not in the mood to see any more of Affleck and Lopez together at this time, so the decision was made to whittle Lopez's screen time down to the bare minimum.

Ollie and the baby, who he names Gertie in honor of his late wife, move to New Jersey to live with his father Bart (George Carlin) - mainly so he can make Bart take care of the baby while he drowns himself in work and avoids dealing with his grief. Eventually Bart gets fed up with Ollie neglecting the baby and forces his son to take the kid to work with him. This happens on a huge day for Ollie, when he's presenting an event involving Will Smith, who was just getting his movie career started around that time. Ollie is dismissive of the idea that the Fresh Prince could be a movie star, and destroys his career when - frustrated by fatherly duties and with the press demanding to see Will Smith, who is late for the event - he openly bashes the Fresh Prince's film aspirations in front of the packed room.

So now Ollie has to accept that he's not a star music publicist anymore, and has to finally start bonding with his daughter. Jump ahead seven years and Ollie is shown to be a devoted dad to first grader Gertie (Castro), working in the Public Works Department with his dad and his dad's pals Greenie (Stephen Root) and Block (Mike Starr), a comedic duo who have been jokingly referred to as the middle-aged Jay and Silent Bob. As part of Ollie's job, he sometimes drives the local street sweeper, which he and Gertie call the Batmobile. So we have Affleck driving a "Batmobile" long before he was cast as Batman.

After Ollie and Gertie have lived an average life in New Jersey for seven years, we follow them through a rather eventful period. Ollie starts to think about getting back into the publicity business and moving back to New York, Gertie becomes fascinated by musicals like Cats and Sweeney Todd, and Ollie meets a woman: video store clerk and grad student Maya Harding (Liv Tyler), who takes note of the fact that Ollie regularly rents porn from the video store and thinks he'd be a good interview subject for her thesis paper on the family man and the pornographic fixation.

Yes, even though this is a PG-13 movie about fatherhood, Smith did work in some dialogue about porn and masturbation. And when Maya finds out that Ollie hasn't had sex since Gertrude passed away, she is quite enthusiastic about helping him out with that issue.

Jersey Girl is a very cute movie that manipulates my emotions like crazy. There are multiple points in there where I get choked up, whether it's scenes that involve Ollie's heartbreak over the loss of Gertrude or scenes about the father-daughter relationship. Castro is adorable as Gertie; Tyler is a lot of quirky fun as Maya, a character who is just as amused by her own lines as any viewer might be; Carlin did a great job as Bart. His performance here really makes me wish he had done a whole lot more acting over the course of his career.

Affleck made Ollie in interesting character to watch. He's a very flawed person, often quite full of himself, and there are times when he loses sight of the fact that he should put his daughter before himself. There are certain moments in this movie where he's downright unlikable, and he needs redemption more than once.

Jason Lee and Matt Damon make a fun cameo, and Will Smith shows up for an important 4 minutes. Of course, Kevin Smith's wife Jennifer Schwalbach and their daughter Harley Quinn Smith show up along the way. But someone who doesn't appear in the film is Jason Mewes.

Mewes' drug addiction issues were at their worst around this time, which caused him to miss out on the role that had been intended for him, Ollie's associate Arthur Brickman. Jason Biggs plays Arthur. Mewes was considered for a second role, a cameo as a delivery guy who observes Ollie doing a terrible job of changing Gertie's diaper, but he missed out on that one because there was a warrant out for his arrest. Matt Maher plays the delivery guy.

Still, Jersey Girl isn't entirely Mewes-less. An animated version of Jay and Silent Bob appear in the logo for the View Askew production company at the head of the film, and animated Jay delivers the line, "Snooch to the nooch!" Another Jay and Silent Bob View Askew logo is the last thing in the end credits. Mewes is heard saying "Nooch" and laughing. So he has vocal bookends on the film.

Jersey Girl was a great chance for Smith to do something a little different from what he had done before and to try to appeal to a wider audience. It's just unfortunate that an "Affleck and Lopez" movie wasn't what the audience wanted at that time. Still, it's a heartwarming movie that holds up, and there's only one thing I would change: I wish Smith wouldn't tell so many self-deprecating jokes about it. Jersey Girl doesn't deserve to be picked on.