The Good Girl

The Good Girl (2002) is a dark comic drama you can watch online on iFILM. Justine works the register at a dingy Texas discount store, married to a man who barely registers her, stuck in a life going nowhere at thirty.

Jennifer Aniston steps far away from her sitcom image here, playing a tired, guarded woman with the makeup stripped off. Things shift when a moody new stock clerk shows up — Holden, a sad-eyed kid who named himself after the Catcher in the Rye narrator and decides Justine is his way out. Jake Gyllenhaal makes him tender and unsettling at once. The affair curdles fast: the lies pile up while her house-painter husband and his stoner buddy suspect nothing.

Mike White wrote the script, and his trademark awkward humor keeps the film balanced on a wire between pity and cruelty. Zooey Deschanel and John C. Reilly turn up in support. The picture proved Aniston could carry a serious role and became a quiet indie hit of the early 2000s. Stream The Good Girl (2002) online on iFILM.