Defiantly Slow 'All the Real Girls' Proves You Can't Hurry Love

In David Gordon Green's "All the Real Girls," two young lovers try to comprehend each other and themselves. Of all the feelings they express in the course of this flawed but beautiful film, one is as basic as the language of love can be. "You have my heart," Zooey Deschanel's Noel tells her boyfriend Paul, who is played by Paul Schneider. Four little words spoken softly, but with a candor that gives them piercing urgency. Who says such unhip things in movies these days? More to the point, how has Mr. Green, at the age of 28, already managed to make two movies that distinguish themselves from others of any day? Like his debut feature of three years ago, the exquisite "George Washington," this new one has my heart, and I think it will have yours.

The hero of "George Washington" was a winsome boy whose skull had failed to fuse; he wore a football helmet to protect his soft fontanel. The lovers in "All the Real Girls" are older -- Noel is 18 and Paul is 22 -- with skulls firmly in place; it's their souls that are still wide open. Noel, recently returned from boarding school to her scruffy home town in North Carolina, is vivid and fitfully articulate but a virgin socially as well as sexually. Paul, a likable dreamer who works on cars when he isn't hanging out with his vague buddies, has been a notorious womanizer around town. Now he's fallen in love with Noel, so, for the first time, he wants to delay having sex, partly to disavow his history of promiscuity and partly to avoid problems with her volatile brother, who happens to be his best friend.

His reluctance, and her ardor, provide the substance of the movie's opening scene, which is long and unfashionably -- almost defiantly -- slow. Long scenes of mounting intensity are one of Mr. Green's specialties. A matched pair of them, each almost six minutes long, take place in bed, but with words, not sex, as the binding force. When sex finally does come to the fore, it threatens to drive the lovers apart.

The film is beset, now and then, by outbreaks of preciousness; I particularly wish they hadn't sent in the clowns. Still, the story feels fresh, professional actors mix comfortably with non-professionals, and both of the starring performances are memorable. Ms. Deschanel has the most experience, and skill; she's like a Tuva throat singer in her ability to express a given emotion and, simultaneously, its complex harmonics. Paul Schneider's role is less dynamic, but this attractive, intelligent and unmannered actor is very much in the American grain, and entirely at home in a movie whose setting is some timeless corner of America -- the period could as easily be the 1970's as the present -- that resonates with our national memory. (Like "George Washington," "All the Real Girls" was shot in small-town North Carolina.)

Rusty remnants of deceased industries, kudzu vines, a crippled dog, distant mountains, it's all taken in by Tim Orr's camera, with special attention to odd juxtapositions but also to serenity and community. (Sometimes the ruminative score sounds like church bells.) The people who live here don't seem to doubt that they belong here, and don't seem to worry about race; they take one another as they come. A sense of community is central to Mr. Green's vision, and I use the V word advisedly. As young as this filmmaker is, he has developed a distinctive style that's both celebratory and elegiac, and one that has been refined, in both films, by Mr. Orr's gorgeous cinematography.

Mr. Green's work has already been compared to that of Terrence Malick in "Days of Heaven," or "Badlands." The visual parallels are irresistible. But Mr. Malick's films are emotionally remote, or at best allusive, while Mr. Green goes for feelings, however mercurial, in every scene. Three years ago, when "George Washington" was released, the director told Charlie Rose that one of the most beautiful movies he'd ever seen was "McCabe and Mrs. Miller." That's a better point of reference, and a more encouraging one. At a time when so many young filmmakers are chroniclers of the dysfunctional and masters of the predictable, along comes a poet of the ineffable.

'Daredevil'

One of the more unwieldy euphemisms of our time is differently abled, as opposed to plain old disabled, but it's the right term for Ben Affleck's character in "Daredevil." By day he is Matt Murdock, a blind lawyer with a tap-tap-tapping white cane, who lost his sight in a childhood accident. By night he is Daredevil, an anti-crime vigilante whose remaining four senses function, as he puts it in a splay-footed voiceover, "with superhuman sharpness." This guy can hear incoming bullets, then dodge them Matrixly. He can smell a beautiful woman on the other side of a plate glass window. (Take that, Al Pacino.) He is also, inexplicably, anti-gravity, bounding around the rooftops of Gotham City -- I mean New York -- like one of Spider-Man's ilk, sans silk. But do his heightened senses dull our own? Not at all. The Man Without Fear has made it from Marvel Comics to the screen with no major mishaps, and, lo, another movie franchise is born.

Before "Daredevil" screened Wednesday night I was a Man With Much Fear. For one thing, movies that screen so late in the week are presumed by people like me to be utter stinkers until proven otherwise; why else would a studio wait until the last possible moment for review? For another, the prospect of seeing Ben Affleck in a red rubber suit prompted certain doubts about him pulling the role off. But massively marketed productions like this one are increasingly critic-proof, and critic-indifferent, if not averse; when they find their young audience, it's mainly through TV trailers, word of mouth or the Web. And Mr. Affleck does pull it off, despite a few clumsy lapses to which his fans will turn millions of blind eyes.

He's witty by day and mostly plausible by night as a superhero with human failings, plus a burning passion for Elektra, a rich martial artist played impressively by Jennifer Garner. Elektra is the woman who first catches Matt's nose, then becomes Daredevil's nemesis, as well as his inamorata. One of the best scenes pits them against each other in high-spirited kung fu combat that recalls the fight over a woman's comb in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." (This and several other fight sequences were staged by the Hong Kong action choreographer Cheung Yan Yuen.) Matt and Elektra also share a delicate moment on a rooftop, where falling rain creates a sort of sonogram that allows him to detect, with his inner radar, the lovely contours of her face. (You might wonder why he doesn't just reach out and touch her in the first place, but that wouldn't be the superheroic thing to do.)

"Daredevil" was written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson, and photographed by Ericson Core. It isn't a great film, or even a greatly original one. Still, it has many grace notes, and interesting oddities. Noise is its hero's kryptonite. Matt struggles not only with a moral dilemma -- how to reconcile his desire to do justice with his vigilante's rage -- but with bodily pain, which he assuages by popping the occasional Darvon or Percoset. Jon Favreau is funny as Matt's partner in a storefront law firm. Joe Pantoliano is a reporter for, no, not the Daily Planet but the New York Post. That human subwoofer Michael Clarke Duncan is Kingpin, the baddest of the city's bad guys. Colin Farrell plays Bullseye, a psychotic killer with perfect aim who seems to be fresh off the boat from "A Clockwork Orange." Bullseye takes a terrible toll in collateral damage, and steals every scene he's in.

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DVD TIP: Criterion has done right by David Gordon Green's "George Washington" (2000) and then some. First and foremost on the disk is the movie itself -- a lyrical, magical meditation on friendship, and what happens when the dream state of childhood must give way to stern reality. Supplementary material includes several short films that the director made in his student days at the North Carolina School of the Arts, and one of his early influences, a startling 1969 short by Clu Gulager called "A Day With the Boys." With digital resources like this, film scholarship becomes barely distinguishable from fun.

Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com