By Scott Muoio

Kevin Smith has graduated. The shame of it is that his diploma reads, “Highlands Mental Institute.”

Jersey Girl is a movie without an audience, save Smith, himself. The story of a hot-shot New York publicist (Ben Affleck) whose wife (Jennifer Lopez) dies during childbirth, the film goes from downer to downright stupid when an Affleck outburst gets him tossed from his job and forces him to move back to New Jersey with his surly but compassionate father (George Carlin). From the downright stupid to the utterly absurd Jersey Girl next moves to approximately six or more Kleenex Moments with each materializing in the form of a two-minute up swell of sad music, i.e. Fleetwood Mac, Bruce Springsteen, et. all. Worse, there is virtually zero chemistry between leads Ben Affleck and new “friend” Liv Tyler (who arrives on the scene in very unconvincing fashion seven years after Lopez’s death), terrible and distracting continuity in both editing (ripped shirts are instantly repaired) and story (where was Affleck’s Ollie living after his wife died?), the message is suspect (family means everything and everything else means nothing), and only about half of the classic Smith back and forth banter works. There are certainly glimpses of greatness (the show and tell segment, the road block, George Carlin’s performance, and an ending cameo appearance that avoids all the clichés while still giving the audience what we want) but the whole thing reeks of a fish out of water. The fish is Smith and his new pond: the romantic comedy sit-com. Not good.

In any movie the relies on redemption of the main character it is imperative that 1) the character must evolve and 2) we must inevitably like either who the characters starts as or who he becomes. Affleck was completely unlikable in this movie. In almost every interaction with his daughter, which constitutes a good majority of the film, he comes off as smarmy, conceited, and a giant blowhard. And those are the segments we are supposed to find him endearing! His daughter (Raquel Castro), meanwhile, as we find in many movies of this ilk, is wise beyond her years in a way that keeps us aware that this is just a movie. Together, they form a pair that I couldn’t get into or take seriously.

Sure, we know Affleck’s redemption is the inevitable conclusion, but it seemed too much like serendipity and not the result of truly coming to understand his relationships with other people. That’s bad writing. Add to that his daughter seemed more like a miniature screen writer incarnate than a real, living, breathing child and what we wind up with is Affleck playing Boiler Room during Steel Magnolias, Castro distracting us and reminding that we’re indeed just watching a movie, Liv Tyler doing a bad Fatal Attraction, and Smith, himself, creating dialogue that floats between genres diverting our attention from the story at hand and reminding us just how contrived this whole affair has become. By the end, nearly all characters seem to resemble fish and all I could see on screen was their exhaustive flopping.

Now for the really weird part of my review: see this movie. I am serious. Kevin Smith is a true pioneer and even though this film is a gigantic misstep I believe it definitively proves he is on his way to something truly great. His odes to slackers, relationships and sexuality, and religion (Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Dogma, respectively) were each masterpieces in their own right, and I think with Jersey Girl he is building toward something else that hasn’t quite been done yet. Smith’s growing maturity is evident here both in his more adult topics and his advancements in camera angles and cinematography. Even though the whole never quite equals the sum of its parts, I suspect seeds from this film will eventually spring into quite a dramatic new species of film. Jersey Girl is by no means a good film by any measure, but it just might be the necessary blunder that leads to Kevin Smith’s best and most innovative film yet. And when that film comes around wouldn’t you like to be able to say you saw it coming, too?