Ten years ago on Wednesday, March 26th, Kevin Smith’s comedy Jersey Girl was released in theaters to widespread audience indifference and a small amount of critical scorn. Up until this point, director Kevin Smith – often called one of the central voices of Generation X, and easily one of the more important filmmakers of the 1990s – was riding pretty high. He had exploded onto the scene in 1994 with Clerks, and proceeded to charm people with a string of four additional slacker-centric foul-mouthed romcoms (and one religious exploration) that all take place within the same universe, and – at the very least – feature his now-famous characters Jay and Silent Bob.
But with 2004’s Jersey Girl, Smith elected to finally give his well-work “Askewniverse” characters a much-needed rest, attempting to make what many critics deemed to be his first “real” movie. Smith was certainly moving out of his comfort zone. This was not only his first Silent Bob-free feature, but it was also not a romance, it was not rated R, and it had a sizable $35 million budget, Smith’s biggest to date. Many of us Smith fans were eager, if perhaps a mite apprehensive, to see what Smith would do with his first technically all-new material since his debut.
Jersey Girl was not hated, per se, but no one loved it. It was largely dismissed by most critics who cited it as being flat, mainstream, and flavorless. Even those who defended it often agreed that it was Smith still finding his feet. Roger Ebert was perhaps the most passionate advocate, giving the film 3 ½ stars.
Ben Affleck starred as a mourning father who has been raising his precocious daughter alone after the unexpected death of his wife (Jennifer Lopez) years earlier. He was once career-minded, but he froze up during an important showbiz presentation when his daughter was just an infant, leaving him shamed and ostracized (he predicted that the Fresh Prince couldn’t possibly ever have a serious movie career). He has now been living embarrassed and girlfriend-less with his father Bart (George Carlin) trying to be a good father. The film follows Affleck’s eventual growth back into the world and into romance, largely instigated by a feisty video store clerk played by Liv Tyler. She’s the forthright, accommodating type: when Affleck announces that he hasn’t had sex in seven years, she immediately offers to break his dry spell.
Jersey Girl is, at the end of the day, sweet and cute, if not slight. This is Smith, it seems, trying to emulate John Hughes, allowing himself to skew sentimental. Yes, the film ends with a mad dash across town to perform in a school musical, and how often have we seen similar dashes through airports? But it’s a good-natured and pleasant movie, and is still marked by Smith’s ear for frank sexual dialogue, even if he did tamp down on the profanity, and skewed away from anything too explicit.
So why did it fail so badly? Why does Jersey Girl elicit a mere 41% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and why has it only made $25 million to date? Why do people today garner it as the Kevin Smith film that they can’t remember too well? Indeed, Cop Out is the only Kevin Smith film that seems to be constantly ranked below Jersey Girl in term’s of Smith’s oeuvre. Jersey Girl is a ten-year-old film that has reached that weird pop culture nether-zone of having almost no reputation at all. If this film had not been directed by Kevin Smith, it would be talked about as often as Down To You. Which you don’t remember. No, you don’t.
The reason Jersey Girl failed was one simple thing: That wolfpack-hunted pop-culture bugbear known cloyingly as “Bennifer.” In 2004, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were not only dating, but they were perhaps the single most visible celebrity couple on the planet. They were tabloid fodder on a weekly basis. They were the subject of a really, really strange episode of “South Park,” which I would rather not describe. People hated Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. They hated the media overexposure. They hated the cutesy “Bennifer” nickname given to them by the tabloids (and I’m sure Affleck and Lopez hated the nickname as well). Never have I seen such a rapid ascendance turn to vitriol so quickly.
And, more than anything, people hated Gigli. Martin Brest’s now-infamous crime comedy turkey – also starring Affleck and Lopez – was released the year previous, and man oh man, you would have thought he murdered a puppy on film. Reviews were wholly negative, but some critics were beaned by angry, bloodthirsty audiences for not being negative enough. Gigli is certainly not a good film (the dialogue is weird, the acting is weird, the characters are weird), but the overwhelming hatred toward it was most certainly the work of a rabid wolfpack mentality. The dominoes toppled on Gigli to an unprecedented degree, leaving audiences in a state of baffling rage. To this day, Gigli enjoys an unenviable spot on the Internet Movie Database’s Bottom 100.
And Jersey Girl – sweet, innocent Jersey Girl – was caught up in the cultural riptide. I suspect that it is misremembered by critics and by audiences merely because of the crowd-created Bennifer incident, leaving Smith’s film – which is merely innocuous at the very worst – muddied with a stigma it had nothing to do with.
Jersey Girl, then – as we can now see from a safe and reconsidered distance of 10 years – is a prime example of pop cultural fallout. A film that failed not by its own demerits, but by extenuating circumstances. For some reason, the whiff of tabloid dissatisfaction lingered unfairly over this maligned little comedy. Jersey Girl is like the pet puppy of an arrested murderer. The puppy itself is blameless – indeed it’s a cute little critter – but you couldn’t get the violent crime out of your head long enough to snuggle with it.
Jersey Girl warrants revisitation like a sumbitch. It’s not a great film, but it is a good film. Just one with a bad reputation. The entire Bennifer thing has cooled down entirely, and now seems like a quaint, bygone piece of nostalgia. J-Lo is now married to (and divorced from) Marc Anthony and they have several children together. Ben Affleck has proved himself to be a soulful and talented director. Kevin Smith, meanwhile, has moved away from his usual movie schedule to focus on his other works. And Jersey Girl is waiting to be rediscovered.
Happy anniversary, Jersey Girl. Let’s hope people find their way back to you.
Witney Seibold is the head film critic for Nerdist, and a contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly articles Trolling, and The Series Project, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
