‘White Girl’ Offers A Lurid, Smart Walk On The Wild Side

It would have been easy for White Girl writer/director’s Elizabeth Wood’s first feature film to have gone horribly wrong and it’s hard to describe its plot without making it sound like an offensive mess. In broad strokes, it’s the story of Leah (Morgan Saylor), a 19-year-old college sophomore from Oklahoma, who moves to an ungentrified block in the Queens neighborhood of Ridgewood. There she takes up with the young, handsome Blue (Brian “Sene” Marc), one of three neighbor locals of Puerto Rican descent who make their living selling drugs. Trouble follows.

Wood’s film isn’t a simple story of innocence corrupted, however, or the empty provocation its title might suggest. In fact, the title contains the first key to understanding what the film’s up to. It’s the story of a white girl, but also about how being a white girl shapes how the rest of the world sees her, and the ways it creates buffers that slow her descent as she makes one bad decision after another — buffers Blue and others don’t enjoy. Leah lives in a New York where it’s easy to fall, but the world lets some fall harder and further than others. (It’s also, not coincidentally, slang for cocaine, featured in this movie in quantities seldom seen since New Jack City.)

The film opens with Leah moving into a new apartment with her roommate (India Menuez). She spends her days working an unpaid internship at a hipster-catering media company where she makes no attempt to fend off the predatory advances of a boss named Jelly (Justin Bartha), insofar as she even has a choice. Given a few lines of coke behind closed doors she’s on her knees, as if this were part of the job description. She spends her nights hanging out and getting high with her friends. Then one evening, after they run out of pot, she takes to the street and tries to buy what she needs from Blue. Respecting the unwritten code that he can sell to neighborhood types but not white girl outsiders here for a semester or two at best, he sees this as a line he cannot cross and refuses to sell to her. Then he changes his mind.

This works out well, for a while. As Leah and Blue fall for each other, Leah gets a free flow of drugs and, through Leah and her friends, Blue gets access to clients willing to pay him three times what he charges locals. He even musters the courage to take a much-larger-than-usual order from a terrifying dealer (Adrian Martinez), secure in the knowledge that he’ll be able to pay him back by the weekend. But when an undercover cop arrests Blue mid-deal, it’s Leah who has to try to turn a profit on the inventory and earn enough money to pay back the dealer and hire a lawyer (Chris Noth) who promises he can get Blue out of jail.

Since its divisive Sundance premiere, White Girl has earned frequent comparisons to Kids, but the similarities only go so deep. Wood’s close-up, handheld filmmaking resembles Larry Clark’s film at times, as does her willingness to depict a lot of ugliness without looking away. But, always just a few careful steps removed from an exploitation movie, White Girl has a pulpy propulsion all its own and a keen sense of the divides between race and class and what happens where those divisions meet. Released to theaters unrated, it’s shocking, sure, but it’s the sense of mounting danger, not the graphic sex and abundant drug use, that keeps the film moving.

As Leah gets herself deeper and deeper into trouble the film explores two questions: Will she be able to get herself out? And what will be left of her if she does? That we still care about her even though she’s seemingly unable to make a single smart choice has a lot to do with Saylor’s performance. Best known for her work as a hapless daughter on Homeland, Saylor’s a revelation here as young woman with lambish looks and wolfish appetites. Leah’s at once reckless and naïve, and Saylor captures both sides of a character who throws herself into debauchery one moment and finds herself in way over her head the next. It feels like an honest depiction of what it feels like to live too much life too quickly and at too young an age. (Wood has said it’s based on her own experiences falling for her drug dealer at Leah’s age, which might have contributed to that feeling.)

Leah doesn’t get off easy, but the film also keeps returning to the idea that she’s entered this dangerous world by choice, a choice Blue and the others never had. Without preachiness — the only liberal pieties expressed in the film come from one of its most despicable characters — White Girl depicts Leah as a tourist who can cross boundaries the locals can’t, at least without paying a horrible cost. Marc plays Blue as a soulful kid who genuinely cares about Leah. Leah not only returns those feelings but goes to extremes to try to save him. But the film also keeps reminding us she has the advantage of being able to walk away. That’s part of what being a white girl means.

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