Suburban Girl | DVD Review

With a ‘she’s going to make it after all’ type of template, Suburban Girl is everything you don’t want in a romantic comedy about female empowerment in a relationship and/or the workplace.

Though Alec Baldwin and Sarah Michelle Gellar aren’t the box office gold they might have been earlier in their career, the reasons why this bypassed the theatrical route and only received a showcase at the Tribeca film festival is perhaps due to the film itself. Similar to the make-up of a Sex and the City two hour special, this “mating dance” (which unfortunately didn’t have the luxury of retaining the same title rights as the novel – Melissa Bank’s The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing would have been such a more attractive title). Short stories “My Old Man” and “The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine” are the short stories that are intertwined into a screenplay that plays with Freudian themes placing a working girl in a looking for a daddy complex and an old man looking to teach a few tricks and add to their trophy case. Problematic is Baldwin’s automatic interest in the Gellar character – it’s a false start that craves a restart – and before the narrative would have the op of turning back he clock the newly formed couple is already sharing ideal 2 o’clock in the morning pajama jam sessions. Marc Klein’s directorial debut is a hybrid of other rom coms, but sadly it desperately lacks bite – safely going down an ineffective and inoffensive route that has about as much punch as your typical montage sequence.


The pair of add-ons come in the form of a standard rom com movie trailer and a director commentary that includes run of the mill anatomy of a scenes and elaborated anecdotes – but what is refreshing is that Klein gives us an open book commentary from a first-timer’s perspective. Offering a “if I knew what I know now” look back at the filmmaking experience – Klein doesn’t hide from the fact that he had little experience – he even has the guts to admit a good portion of shots that he simply dislikes, or moments that he ripped off from others he admires and the scenes where actors like Baldwin had a good idea worth exploring. Emphasis is placed on the director’s chair being a difficult one to be sitting in.

A direct-to-video offering that offers very little in terms of originality, if you’re a fan of either actor or want one more rom com that takes place in the big apple and/or like the whole female empowerment angle than this diversion is worth the quick detour.

Movie rating – 0.5

Disc Rating – 2.5