Highs & Lows: David Gordon Green

by Patrick Bromley

A truly wild career.

What a fascinating filmography David Gordon Green has. The Arkansas-born writer/director has had several major movements to his career: beginning as one of the most personal and promising indie filmmakers of his generation -- at one point he seemed the heir apparent to Terrence Malick -- Green attempted to bring his sensibilities to mainstream comedies in the late 2000s before abandoning those unique touches completely for traditional studio fare and then pivoting again to horror in 2018. He hasn't given up making smaller, more personal films, taking a kind of "one for you, one for me" approach with titles like Prince Avalanche and Manglehorn sprinkled throughout his resume, but nothing about the directions his career has taken could have been predicted from his early work. Here are some of the high and low points of David Gordon Green's incredibly varied filmography.

Low: The Sitter (2011)

David Gordon Green's transition to bigger-budget studio comedies was a mixed bag, with 2011's The Sitter the weakest among them. Jonah Hill takes his leading man status out for a test drive as a minor variation on his Superbad character, a college dropout tasked with babysitting a group of kids; hijinks of increasingly questionable legality ensue. If this sounds like the R-rated Adventures in Babysitting, that's a bingo. I don't have a huge problem with that -- even Green's better comedies were made up mostly of nostalgic influences -- but none of this is funny or inspired. It goes through the dirty motions of all the post-Apatow studio comedies, overestimating our affection for kids swearing and/or Jonah Hill swearing at kids or putting them in danger. Bad behavior is not, in and of itself, funny.

High: Pineapple Express (2008)

Ha ha. Get it? High? Green's pivot to comedy originally seemed revelatory and exciting, mostly because he hadn't done anything like it to that point. Seth Rogen and a pre-cancellation James Franco at his most affable star as a two stoner buds (Get it? Buds?) who have to go into hiding when they witness a murder. What seems on the surface to be an excuse for a lot of weed humor -- never my favorite strain of comedy -- becomes, by the end, an excuse for David Gordon Green to riff on the violent buddy action movies of the 1980s (complete with title song performed by Huey Lewis and the News!). This is the best of his studio comedies because is allows him to translate Rogen and Evan Goldberg's script while retaining his oddball own sensibilities. Green also deserves credit for casting his regular collaborator Danny McBride in a major role,  as he proves to be the movie's secret weapon.

Low: Halloween Kills (2021)

The middle chapter in DGG's new trilogy of Halloween movies is easily the weakest of the three and a truly bad horror film. Green (along with co-writers Scott Teems and Danny McBride) can't totally be blamed; what was originally intended to be two movies got stretched into a trilogy Hobbit-style after the success of Halloween (2018), meaning Kills exists mostly as placeholding filler. As a slasher with the highest body count of the franchise, it's watchable. It is, however, a deeply stupid and at times profoundly shitty movie that does dirty by nearly every single one of its characters and chooses mean-spiritedness over developing a compelling story, a consistent tone, or point of view. If not for another movie further down this list, I would make a case for this as David Gordon Green's worst movie.

High: Halloween Ends (2022)

I know this will be a polarizing choice. That's because this is a polarizing movie, one that hardly anyone who had seen the previous two Halloween entries could have seen coming. Michael Meyers and Laurie Strode take a backseat to newcomer Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), a nice but nerdy guy who becomes the town pariah after tragedy strikes and eventually turns toward the dark side. Yes, DGG is basically remaking Christine but with Michael Myers instead of a possessed car, and the results are infinitely more interesting than the two Halloween movies that preceded this one. If anything, it's the need to tie everything back to Myers and Laurie Strode that hobbles this one creatively, offering a showdown that disappointed diehard fans because Green barely seems to care about paying it off. He seems energized by the Corey stuff, and it injects the third entry with the kind of offbeat eccentricity that characterized his early work. This was a real grower for me.

Low: Our Brand is Crisis (2015)

This isn't a bad movie, just one that doesn't exist. David Gordon Green is too idiosyncratic a filmmaker to make a movie that doesn't exist. A narrative feature based on Rachel Boynton's 2005 documentary of the same name, Our Brand is Crisis casts Sandra Bullock as a political consultant hired aboard a team of strategists to elect a Bolivian politician (Joaquim de Almeida) president of his home country. This movie's biggest crime is that it feels in almost every way like traditional studio fare, as if Green was using it as an audition for more mainstream work. All of his interesting edges are sanded off and the result feels like would-be awards bait with just the right amounts of indie cynicism and Hollywood redemption. Again, it's not all that bad, but it's generically for-hire and lacks the personality of even his lesser movies.

High: Joe (2013)

Going back to his indie roots following his string of studio comedies, David Gordon Green helped rescue Nicolas Cage from the DTV wilderness (for a time, anyway) and gave the actor one of his best post-Oscar roles to date. He plays the titular character, the mysterious head of a crew responsible for poisoning trees in Texas, who strikes up a friendship with a young man working for him (Tye Sheridan). When Joe sees the young man being abused by his deadbeat father, he steps in and their intertwined fates are more or less sealed. Joe proved to be a return to form for Green, getting him back to the kind of small-scale and offbeat character study that made his name in the first place. Despite a sense of inevitability that hangs over the proceedings, Joe is hard to pin down, hard to predict. It's among Green's best movies.

Low: The Exorcist: Believer (2023)

Green's worst movie, on the other hand, finds him re-teaming with the folks at Blumhouse and trying to have the same success with a legacy sequel to The Exorcist that he had with Halloween. The first of a planned trilogy of new Exorcist movies for Blumhouse, Believer introduces new characters experiencing demonic possession while also tying in both Ellen Burstyn and, yes, even (spoilers) Linda Blair, a formula that had sort of worked for him previously but which proves disastrous here. Even at their worst, his Halloween films were watchably stupid and kinetic when it came to staging the violence. DGG doesn't seem to be the least bit interested in exorcisms or The Exorcist and the whole thing is a total slog, poorly written and indifferently directed with only a good performance by Leslie Odom Jr. to keep it afloat. The finished film was such a misfire and the word of mouth so toxic that Green walked away (or was asked to walk away) from the two sequels and the reins of the franchise were handed over to Mike Flanagan, for whom this sort of thing seems a better fit.

High: All the Real Girls (2003)

After more than two decades of making movies, I still think this is David Gordon Green's best movie. The story of a romance between an experienced small-town Southerner (Paul Schneider) and his best friend's younger sister (Zooey Deschanel), All the Real Girls draws on the same lyrical sense of place and time that defined George Washington but adds stronger characterization and more of a narrative spine...sort of. Narrative isn't really at the forefront of this one, which is much more about how things feel than about what happens. Green explores first love, heartbreak, bruised ego, and the way that some men can't get out of their own way (this would pair well with Chasing Amy for reasons) when they feel like they've been wronged. It's beautiful and about as honest as something like Exorcist: Believer is dishonest. The movie also deserves credit for giving early roles to Schneider, Shea Whigham, Danny McBride (in his acting debut), and Deschanel giving her first movie star turn. All the Real Girls promised that David Gordon Green was supposed to be one of the greats.