The Good Guy

I end my little run of Alexis Bledel films with The Good Guy, a 2009 film written and directed by Julio DiPietro. It's a more adult film than Bledel has ever done, and it's mostly thoughtful, if not incredibly powerful. It treads into a fairly common arena of film--the aggressive, alpha-male world of Wall Street--and it's conclusion is familiar.

The main character, who narrates, is Tommy (Scott Porter), a young but successful Wall Street trader. He is called upon to replace a member of his sales team, and chooses, despite his boss's objections, an IT guy, Daniel (Bryan Greenberg). Greenberg is vastly out of place with the hot-shot traders, who know how to wine and dine their clients and live a "masters of the universe" kind of existence, clubbing all night and using and discarding women. Porter has a steady girlfriend, though, Bledel, though we come to learn there is more to him than we are led to believe. Porter tries to teach his methods of seduction to Greenberg, who is hopelessly inept when it comes to talking to women.

The film has some literary pretensions--there are references made and parallels to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (I don't know of any other film that discusses the concept of the unreliable narrator) and I liked the overall intelligence of the script. What I find tedious is the depiction of guys like Porter and his buddies. I'm sure that there are men who act this way--we see them all the time in almost every beer commercial that airs on television--which is why I don't need to see any more of it. Greenberg, the "good guy" of the title, is presented as the sympathetic hero, but if I never see another scene of shallow, rich young men hitting on women in an exclusive Manhattan nightclub, I would be grateful.

As for Bledel, who must be catnip for cinematographers as they emphasize her amazing blue eyes, it's good to see her expanding upon her fan base of teenage girls cultivated by The Gilmore Girls and The Sisterhood of Traveling Pants films. She's quite good here.