Kevin Smith Week: ‘Jersey Girl’

‘Jersey Girl’, to many View Askew fans, is the red headed stepchild of Kevin Smith’s films, but not due to the content. Content wise, the material is far more tame, his only non-R rated film, but where this viewer thinks that the material is on par with the rest of his work, most View Askew fans hold this movie as a piece of shit, and Kevin Smith seems to embrace that idea himself, to a certain extent, by constantly poking fun at it ever since its release to much delight of his following. And to be quite honest, I don’t get it.

Well, that is a stretch, I do get it, people aren’t spouting the word fuck every other sentence and a lot of the Kevin Smith crowd sadly comes across as people who need that to enjoy a movie, which is fine, but we shouldn’t let that discrimination of a great product like ‘Jersey Girl’ sully what is actually a very affective and funny family comedy.

Ollie (Ben Affleck) is a PR rep in the early 90’s and is on the fast track for success. His wife Gertrude (Jenifer Lopez) and him are incredibly happy and are wondrously looking towards their future family with the expecting of their first child, Gertie (Raquel Castro) but Ollie’s world is shattered with this loss of his wife during child birth. Struggling to keep up with work and his child, Ollie turns to his dad Bart (George Carlin) to take care of most of the duties of the baby. Well, Bart puts the weight back on Ollie, telling him he needs to be her father, and unfortunate circumstances of having his baby at the Fresh Prince’s record release conference cause him to fall from grace in the PR world and forced to work public service, moving in with his father back in Jersey and out of NYC.

Ollie raises Gertie, being a loving father and forming an incredible bond with her, never dating since the loss of his wife, when Maya (Liv Tyler) enters his life and shakes things up for the first time in Gertie’s life.

Now, if you read this short synopsis of the film, you would never think it is a Kevin Smith film, but the film really is a Smith film at heart. Sure it surrounds a kid and her dad, but there are plenty of taboos and sexuality explored here. He has a couple stellar cameos, there are plenty of pop culture references, and there is a real heart to this film about the bond between two people that is a part of every Kevin Smith film ever released. If you think the stuff in this film is too sweet, you must have not grasped a lot of the filmmaker’s films in the past to their full effect. Whether it is the bond between friends or lovers, Smith is great at showing a real bond between to people that care about each other, and the sentiment he is able to bring to his films is really one of the most capturing things about his work. There are plenty of people that can create crude and funny jokes, but Smith’s ability to give it heart and build characters and connections that we care about is why we re-visit his films so much and not some of that other stuff that slowly fades out of focus. And this film holds true to that formula, Smith created a pretty edgy and boundary pushing family film here, with a great set of relationships and characters for us to connect to it.

Which brings me to the point I mentioned early, in that I can’t stand that this film is the butt of so many jokes. If this film was released today, it would be to much warmer and larger reception. It was released in a time when Ben Affleck was loathed by critics, and anything that he and J-Lo did together was painted a disaster before anyone saw a frame of the picture. ‘Gigli’ ruined this film before it had a chance to shine, and Smith was put in a very tough position. Pre-release and pre-Jo-Lo/Affleck backlash, Smith spoke profusely positive about this film. Said it was his most personal and proudest thing he has been a part of truly came across as it was his favorite film he had done to date. I even had the opportunity to ask him about his feelings on the film during an Evening With Kevin Smith session I attended, and he couldn’t have came across as more positive and sincere with his answer reflecting on the positive experience he took from making that film. After the fallout of Affleck and J-Lo in ‘Gigli’, Smith cut out a lot of their material, taking J-Lo’s part to a minimum and Smith’s original cut was long gone. He has since screened the original cut of the film to much praise, and many people prefer and enjoy this cut for sure. Personally, as some one who enjoys this film, I can’t wait till he releases it on DVD and see his true vision of this film that he and Affleck were both very vocally proud of before it became the butt of many jokes in the view askew world.

‘Jersey Girl’ is a great and different kind of family film that feels very real and avoids much of the sap, while giving us some great characters with amazing connections and relationships with one another that we can really get behind. So if you never gave this film a chance, I think you should reconsider, and if you still can only get off on dick and fart jokes, well ‘Zack and Miri’ has plenty of those for you. ‘Jersey Girl’ is full of laughs and heart and while Smith is one of the best at crude humor, as ‘Zack and Miri’ continues to show, he shows that he can be more than that with this film and remains a vastly underappreciated work from his catalog.