In ‘Miller’s Girl,’ is Jenna Ortega Pushing Back Against Her Teenage Roles, or Playing with Fire?

Jenna Ortega hasn’t aged out of teenage roles just yet. There’s no rush: She’s only 21, plenty of teen parts are cast slightly older to avoid child labor difficulties, and she specifically is on the hook for a second season (and presumably more) of her smash YA series Wednesday, one of the biggest hits in the history of Netflix. She’s also completed a major role in the Beetlejuice sequel as Winona Ryder’s daughter, most likely hewing closer to teenager than seasoned adult professional. Yet at the same time, the mere fact of Ortega’s ascendant stardom means that adult parts will come calling soon enough, especially with her rep as a scream queen (half-literally; she starred in the last two Scream movies) has leading her down darker, more grown-up paths. That dichotomy between fresh-faced youth and adult movie stardom is something her new movie Miller’s Girl seems particularly aware of, to a sometimes discomfiting degree. It also functions as a broader commentary on the decade-plus some stars spend poised to graduate high school.

In the film, Ortega plays Cairo Sweet, whose very name provides a tip-off that writer-director Jade Halley Bartlett will be operating in a somewhat heightened register – half literary, half disreputable pulp paperback (maybe one-quarter literary, come to think of it). She’s a teenager in Tennessee, attending a well-appointed but curiously underpopulated high school in an area with obvious wealth but that she persists in describing as an abandoned backwater. Cairo is a gifted writer – and this is not the kind of movie that shies away from offering examples of what a character’s supposed gifts sound like on paper. She takes a senior-year class with Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman), who once seemed to be on the verge of writerly success but never followed up his flop of a debut short story collection.

Cairo reads his book anyway, an act of profound flattery, and the two quickly become close: trading insights, smoking cigarettes together, talking about literature. She’s in search of an essay topic for her college applications and a ticket out of her hometown. (You’d think such a precocious student would know that these administrative matters are best worked out well before February of senior year.) He’s in search of, well, some kind of validation. Though Cairo expresses some genuine desire to her only friend Winnie (Gideon Adlon), who herself has feelings of lust toward another teacher, Miller takes pains avoid crossing the line with his boundary-pushing protégé. Or, wait: Does he?

If you’ve already let out a full-body cringe, that’s understandable. Is there any relief in knowing that Miller’s Girl was written and directed by a woman, rather than a man fantasizing up an impossibly brilliant, mature, and manipulative admirer? A little. More specifically, Bartlett seems interested in how Cairo’s potential manipulations can’t entirely work without some degree of complicity from Miller, poking at whether it’s even possible for a man of a certain age and standing to keep some of his instincts in check. The movie leaves one crucial scene between the two characters somewhat ambiguous, but raises the provocative question of whether maybe Miller’s fantasies, and lies about them, suggest a guilt that goes beyond what did or did not happen between them physically.

It’s a movie without easy solutions. That could be due to the way it abstracts its own problems, , as everyone on screen is such an obviously arch construction that it’s hard to take their what-if dilemmas seriously. That the movie remains interesting can be attributed to Bartlett’s dialogue, which can at least claim a passable attempt at wit even (sometimes especially) when it’s too clever for its own good; and the two leading actors, who make this material feel far more plausible than it probably should. Freeman is the rare British actor whose charisma doesn’t flatten out with his American accent, maybe because he tends to play such modest, buttoned-up characters in the first place, and Ortega is, simply put, a star. She holds the screen with a piercing gaze and preternatural steadiness, as Bartlett uses the movie’s stylization to play up Ortega’s gothic vibes. (She arrives at school by emerging from a forest, as if wandering in from a fairy tale.)

Some of Ortega’s fans may be put off by her playing a character who enthusiastically and explicitly riffs on Henry James. (Presumably at least some of the Gen-Z prudery sects enjoy her work.) Yet it’s refreshing, in a way, to see a young actress actually addressing the weird coming-of-age purgatory that’s expected of so many performers. Look at Emma Roberts, who entered cinematic high school some time around 2007 and didn’t really get out until around Nerve (2016), where she played a high-school senior at 25. Or take Emma Stone, about as respected and beloved an under-40 star as exists: Her first film was Superbad, also in 2007, in which she played a girl around 17 years old, presumably close to high school graduation. She followed that with playing a teenager in The Rocker (2008), a college student in The House Bunny (2008), another high-schooler around 17 in Easy A (2010), and yet another high-schooler around 17 in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), before graduating high school again in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) and re-entering college for Irrational Man (2015) – where she plays a precocious student whose professor regards her with lust, just like Ortega in Miller’s Girl.

During this eight-year period, Stone hovered around high-school graduation without exclusively playing characters between the ages of 17 and 19. She interspersed roles as full-grown adults in The Help (2011), Crazy Stupid Love (2011), Gangster Squad (2013), and Aloha (2015), all of which more closely reflected her actual age, and none of which represent her best work. It’s not that Stone wasn’t convincing in adult roles so much that she had been locked on ingenue mode, seemingly unable to break out of it in earnest until La La Land (2016), wherein she specifically played an aspiring actress fast approaching an age where she might have to admit Hollywood defeat.

She won an Oscar, and that was that: No more ingenues, at least until her latest shot at an Oscar with the current Poor Things. Her Bella Baxter is a fantastical creation – a woman’s body with a baby’s brain, which quickly develops through childhood, adolescence, and a wiser understanding of the ways of the world – and maybe Stone is so successful in bringing her to life because of her experience in a movie world that simultaneously urges actresses toward envelope-pushing “maturity” while arresting them on the precipice of adulthood, preserving them around 18 for close to a decade at a time. The expectations placed upon Bella are similarly confounding, and she doesn’t have decades of conditioning to prepare her. Rather than tame her unruliness, she redirects those impulses toward her independence.

Despite its occasional fairy-tale imagery, Miller’s Girl is not Jenna Ortega’s Poor Things. (It is, as mentioned, closer to her Irrational Man: a sometimes-awkward but never-boring curio seemingly taking place in an alternate universe.) It’s too hypothetical, too divorced from the recognizable human behavior that Bella and Poor Things both parody and investigate. But it does contain a kind of honesty in its presentation of Ortega as an object of sexuality that can’t be scrubbed away by simply recognizing her talent. That Ortega wanted to take this part suggests a keen understanding that she’s being watched, something that obviously occurs to Cairo Sweet; if she lets anyone turn away from her at this age, she risks diminishing the peak of her power. Is the movie playing with fire by examining Cairo’s agency, or just using Ortega’s special-effects charisma to create a kind of hot-topic simulation? It’s hard to say, exactly. But at least this is a movie actually thinking about its instincts to keep its star in high school.  

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.