What’s Wrong With Virginia

The directorial debut of Oscar winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, What’s Wrong With Virginia follows Jennifer Connelly’s title character through her various exploits – with the film primarily focused on her relationships with her teenage son (Harrison Gilbertson’s Emmett) and her married lover (Ed Harris’ Sheriff Tipton). It’s clear right from the get-go that What’s Wrong With Virginia‘s problems stem primarily from Virginia herself, as the character, despite fine work from Connelly, comes off as a hopelessly familiar figure that viewers have seen countless times before in far, far better movies. Black’s stylized, hopelessly quirky sensibilities are exacerbated by an aggressively meandering narrative, with the pervasively pointless atmosphere ensuring that the film’s various periphery characters remain utterly undeveloped from start to finish. It’s subsequently not surprising to note that there’s never a point at which the viewer is able to work up an ounce of interest in any of this, although, to be fair, the film does improve slightly in its final 20 minutes as the narrative adopts a darker and more downbeat tone. This is hardly enough to compensate for the aggressively meaningless nature of everything leading up to it, of course, and there’s ultimately little doubt that What’s Wrong With Virginia seems to exist purely as a result of Black’s recent Oscar win for the vastly superior Milk.

*1/2 out of ****