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Weekend Watch is here for you. Every Friday we’re going to recommend the best of what’s new to rent on VOD or stream for free. It’s your weekend; allow us to make it better.
What to Stream This Weekend
The micro-genre of gritty, harrowing, self-consciously shocking dramas about teens in New York City — with all the sex and drug use and grimy-tank-tops-in-a-heat-wave that they entail — has been going for long enough that we can’t make a straight-faced claim to be scandalized by them anymore, can we? After all, Larry Clark’s headline-making Kids is now old enough to drink legally. Whether as recent as Heaven Knows What, as un-recent as The Panic in Needle Park, or as non-New York as Thirteen, we’re becoming used to these tales and in particular the way they’ve always used the white-girl-gone-bad as a kind of boogeyman to haunt parents and would-be parents alike. Remember Erika Christensen’s subplot in Traffic?
So director Elizabeth Wood’s narrative feature debut, White Girl, certainly can’t lay claim to any kind of novel provocation. Wood’s main character — a college student named Leah (played by Morgan Saylor, formerly of Homeland) — moves to a new apartment in Queens for the summer with her best friend, and between her fried-blonde hair and the fact that the camera never lets us forget that she and her friend are barely dressed in tank-tops and booty-shorts, you know where this is going. And that’s even before the camera then cuts to the trio of ogling neighborhood boys on the corner. But while a lesser movie would have plunged Leah into the deep end of the pool and had her preyed upon by these Latino boys, forced down a rabbit hole of drugs and demeaning sex, and ultimately endangered to the point where she needs a rescue, White Girl sees Leah wander blithely — so goddamn blithely! — down the rabbit hole on her own accord. For better and for worse. And when it comes to needing a rescue, Wood is resolute in her conviction that Leah be cushioned at almost every turn by an invisible bubble of privilege. It’s that crucial difference that keeps White Girl on the right side of line from pure exploitation, and it’s what gives the film its point of view.
As Leah, Morgan Saylor gets the role of her young lifetime (sorry, Dana Brody on Homeland), and she’s a knockout, keeping Leah’s naivety, hedonism, and misplaced righteousness in perfect balance. Leah is a fuckup, first and foremost, but she’s a fuckup who keeps managing to get away with it. Coke-dealing boyfriend gets pinched by an undercover cop? Leah was in the right place at the right time? Attempts to sell coke in order to pay for boyfriend’s legal representation? Bailed out by the boss who’s currently exploiting her for sex. The point of White Girl isn’t that Leah has things easy — certainly the many and repeated ways in which Leah is sexually exploited and violated in this movie tell the audience all they need to know about the ways in which she is vulnerable — but that her ability to sneak out of the kinds of situations that land other people in a jail or a grave or worse is unique to a white girl like her. Just the fact that she’s able to snort up quantities of cocaine that would knock down a polar bear and walk away with her life makes her some kind of teen drug sorceress.
While Saylor is busy making her mark, Wood is doing the same behind the camera. She gives White Girl a version of New York City that feels alive with danger but never cartoonishly sinister. Leah is maddening but never villainous. There are men who mean her harm at every turn, but the movie never begs for sympathy for her. It’s a movie that stays clear-eyed even though Leah never is; it’s a movie with a social conscience even though Leah has none.
