The Good Girl

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The Good Girl

Directed by	Miguel Arteta
Produced by	Matthew Greenfield
Written by	Mike White
Starring	Jennifer Aniston Jake Gyllenhaal John C. Reilly Zooey Deschanel
Distributed by	Fox Searchlight Pictures
Release date(s)	August 7, 2002
Running time	93 min
Language	English
Budget	$8,000,000
IMDb profile

The Good Girl is a film from the Chuck & Buck team, director Miguel Arteta writer and star Mike White and producer Matthew Greenfield. It was released by 20th Century Fox's Fox Searchlight Pictures division. The movie stars Jennifer Aniston, Jake Gyllenhaal, Tim Blake Nelson, Zooey Deschanel, John C. Reilly and John Carroll Lynch. The movie was released on August 7, 2002.

1 Plot
2 Cast
3 Crew
4 External links

[edit] Plot

Justine Last (Aniston) faces a boring life each day. Working at the Retail Rodeo discount store, married to her pot-smoking husband (Reilly), and dealing with the same people, same places, same everything. Until she meets fellow worker Thomas Worther (Gyllenhaal), who calls himself Holden, after Holden Caulfield (the main character in the novel The Catcher in the Rye). The two become friends, but it isn't long before the two spark an affair that brings fleeting comfort for Justine as much as it threatens to ruin her marriage and reputation. As the affair heats into an obsession, Justine must decide whether to keep the life she has now or leave it behind forever. The story is a modern reworking of Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

The film derives inspiration and source material from The Sorrows of Young Werther, a loosely autobiographical novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe about a suicide and unrequited love. This is especially notable due to Thomas's last name (Worther | Werther).^{[citation needed]}