The Girl in the Park

Anchored by a pair of phenomenal lead performances, The Girl in the Park is a sporadically overwrought but mostly compelling film concerning the disappearance of a young girl from a public park. Sixteen years later, the girl’s mother (Sigourney Weaver’s Julia) is still unable to deal with the loss of her child – though her mental state seems to improve considerably following the arrival of a scrappy young woman named Louise (Kate Bosworth) into her life (it’s clear, however, that Julia is secretly hoping that Louise might be her long lost daughter). Noted playwright David Auburn makes his directorial debut with The Girl in the Park, and he’s infused the movie with a deliberate sensibility that generally works – although the filmmaker occasionally can’t quite resist the temptation to emphasize a few melodramatic elements (eg the sequence in which Julia is arrested for hanging around a playground). There’s little doubt that it’s the stellar work by both Weaver and Bosworth that ultimately transforms The Girl in the Park into a surprisingly involving little drama, with the mystery surrounding Louise’s true identity (is she or isn’t she?) effectively holding the viewer’s interest even through some of the film’s less-than-successful sequences.

*** out of ****