It’s hard to tell at any point during The Starling Girl what the journey is going to be for Jem Starling, played exceptionally by Eliza Scanlen. Is she going to leave the church or abandon her faith wholesale? Will these passions she’s chasing bear fruit or leave her high and dry? Whatever it is, it’s clear she has to escape the cultish evangelist community she has grown up in, and yet that is a hard thing to do given the firmness of its indoctrinated effects. There’s a scene of confrontation where you hope for a blowout or a sharp argument over logical fallacies and very clear attempts at gaslighting -but of course that’s not what happens, her defensiveness has been whittled away by doctrine, by the pre-eminent truth as she’s been taught that the people condemning her are always right.
What makes The Starling Girl more curious than your average movie critique of extreme Christian fundamentalism is the fact it is told from within that community. There are good movies like it that take to task the harms of this sect of religiosity, notably movies that concern conversion therapy, but they come from the outside perspective. Even those based on books by Miriam Toews, who experienced intense Ana-baptism firsthand, are a little detached due to the cynical nature towards the religion from the point of view of one who has left it. The Starling Girl and first-time writer-director Laurel Parmet, have sympathy for the faith itself, just not the way it is articulated, not the way it has been abused to control people -women like Jem especially.
Though there are elements that seem wild, the general tenor of this moderately isolated township in rural Kentucky rings true of a few hard-line Christian communities I have run into in what might affectionately be called the ‘Canadian Bible Belt’. It’s got it all: that extremely insular faith community where church functions are valued above all else, the air of enforced piety and public shame that everyone is conditioned into adhering to, the utmost certainty in their religiosity coming out in the frequency of Christian rhetoric in everyday life, subtleties of misogyny, homophobia, and racism to their methods, and perhaps most of all that toxic “friendliness” that poorly masks extreme judgment (the one that I personally have seen most amongst young evangelicals specifically). Parmet shoots much of it across a handful of strictly supervised locations giving it the impression of a prison, just one with a lot of forced smiles. But she acknowledges the little reprieves within that oppressing system –specifically the dance troupe that Jem finds real joy and expression in, that she eventually is tasked with leading and choreographing.
The intersection between the stringent contours of Jem’s faith life and that of a normal adolescence are fascinating. While her mother (Wrenn Schmidt) seems to have lived all her life in this kind of environment (and Schmidt is very good at conveying the suppressed sense of frustration she has for this –even resentment towards Jem for her ability to defy it), Jem’s father (Jimmi Simpson) comes from outside of it –having been part of a rising country music band before caving to alcoholism and coming out of it born-again. He’s the only person who gives Jem any leeway, indicating it’s okay to make fun of a certain stripe of radio gospel preacher or encouraging her to be creative in her dance pursuits. While church is the centre of her life and she is taught to do nothing that isn’t in praise of God, she finds ‘sinfully’ personally fulfilling ways to do so. Through her dad and her passions, she has this vital freeing foot out the door of the church’s system of control, able to recognize the need to escape even without articulating it. She sees this in pastor’s son Owen Taylor (Lewis Pullman) as well, and it’s what draws her to him.
Well that, and the sex appeal. In a striking effort at playing against type, Pullman as Owen is charismatic and confident, attractive and alluring, a very cool and mysterious worldly rebel (lightly of course, given his community). Like a hippie in a New Hollywood film, he typifies everything that is so liberating to Jem, is liberal and interesting, and unafraid to criticize the church in front of her. In fact he is willing to go far outside the bounds of the church’s rules. This central romance walks a tightrope that Parmet is very aware of: it is both an exciting way for Jem to experience sexual and intellectual fulfillment in a manner her authorities would never tolerate, but it is also its own act of abuse, gaslighting and grooming on Owen’s part -who is somewhere in his mid-twenties while Jem is only seventeen. He clearly steers her into the relationship, validates her attachment to him and belief in their God-ordained destiny to be together. He is an escape, but only into a different kind of entrapment.
Yet Scanlen’s performance would almost sell its earnestness. The most underrated of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, she plays Jem with all the tact and confidence her avatar lacks. Jem can be a fairly unpredictable character, and in inhabiting her Scanlen runs the gamut of difficult emotions and actions, bringing as much believability to Jem’s violent attack on her arranged boyfriend as to her shrinking humility under her mother and suppressed fury at the resident dance critic -who happens to be Owen’s wife. It’s an incredible display, and one of Scanlen’s finest showcases thus far.
It’s a pretty fine debut from Parmet too, who is able to illustrate succinctly the insinuating horrors of this kind of environment, especially on teenage girlhood, without ever coming across dishonestly -even through the high stakes drama of the film’s plotting. There’s an urgency conveyed, even if Jem or Owen aren’t fully aware of it. The movie isn’t fundamentally anti-Christian at its heart (by the end Jem still thoroughly believes in the real tenets of her Christian devotion), but it does strongly come down on this kind of ultra-righteous, restrictive aberration of that faith and the ways it insidiously corrupts. Take note of how Jem is made to feel dehumanized and honestly believe it in the last act as the main guilty party in the ‘seduction’ of the minister’s poor son. The devil is in the teenage girl but curiously not the grown man.
I like the ending to this movie a lot, one that in more than a few ways resembles the end of The Graduate, but seems to be Parmet’s postulation on what comes next. Jem realizing her freedom does not fit the form she assumed it would for most of the narrative is rather inspiring, and her true passions lead her far beyond the grips of any who would mold her into a simple drone. The Starling Girl, engaging, direct, and compassionately drawn, may not be the most intrepid or scathing of movies critiquing fundamentalist Christianity, but it does earn such a final beat.
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