Movie review in the Friday, May 21 Oregonian....
"The Exploding Girl" is a small film about a fragile person. Ivy (Zoe Kazan) is an epileptic college student visiting her mother on a break. Ivy's safe-male friend Al (Mark Rendall) is crashing on Ivy's couch for the week. Al nurses a quiet crush on Ivy -- even as Ivy is quietly twisted in knots as her boyfriend slowly dumps her via cell phone.
And that's about it. "The Exploding Girl"'s conversations are self-consciously inarticulate, its moments mostly mundane. It's a movie made of un-Hollywood languid bits, many of them shot at a remove. But "Girl" works as a minimalist, occasionally quite lovely little vibe-piece -- with writer/director Bradley Rust Gray using all those tiny moments to build a slow, cumulative emotional suspense in which the payoff isn't much more than a couple of gestures.
Kazan makes this exercise worthwhile with her oddly compelling performance. On the surface, Ivy seems to be doing little more than mumbling, walking, making phone calls and staring into space. But Kazan has a gift for letting you see her think, even when she's perfectly still; the film's title refers to the ferocious trauma happening between Ivy's ears and her silent struggle to keep it in check.
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(79 min., unrated, playing in Portland at the Hollywood Theatre) Grade: B
'The Exploding Girl' (The Oregonian, Friday, May 21, 2010)
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