The Good Girl is pretty good indie film that is notable in that it marks Jennifer Aniston's first film that is near complete departure from her lovable "Friends" personae. Aniston plays a woman who has become bored with her life. Her job as a cashier at the Retail Rodeo, (a local ShopKo sort of establishment) is a daily exercise in clock-watching - and her marriage of 7 years to John C. Reilly has become a stagnant and perfunctory affair. Reilly loves his wife, but isn't the most attractive or inspiring man, a house-painter whose chief hobby is smoking pot with his buddy and partner played by Tim Blake Nelson.

Aniston finds it difficult to find anyone to relate to and can barely tolerate the people she works with. Whether it's the good cheer of Gwen (Deborah Rush), the wackiness of Cheryl (Zooey Deschanel), or the patronizing attitude of Jack Field (John Carroll Lynch), the store manager and particularly the religious enthusiasm of a Bible-quoting security guard Corny (Mike White, who also wrote the screenplay).

Aniston plays this disenchanted Texas girl with kind of a hang-dog shoe-staring manner that, though a bit too studied, is an interesting twist for her. Adding to her dead-end outlook is the fact that she has been unable to get pregnant, which doesn't seem to bother her husband, which just infuriates her all the more.

The story gets cooking when a new clerk is hired at the Retail Rodeo. The mysterious and intriguing new guy is played by Jake Gyllenhaal, whose name is Tom but who goes by Holden because he identifies with the protagonist of "Catcher in the Rye." Aniston is right away attracted to the brooding and artistic pretenses of Gyllenhaal's Holden and rationalizing it to herself as a means to avoid "going to the grave with unlived lives in (my) veins," gives in to his advances and they fall into a passionate affair.

Despite her terrible guilt and the gulf in their age (12 years) they share in common a desire for something more adventurous than their mundane suburban life and they also identify with each other because his parents don't get him, and her husband doesn't get her. Their relationship slowly leads to trysts at a local motel where Gyllenhaal soon proves to be kind of a wingnut who is desperate for Aniston to read his stories. He fancies himself as a writer with great potential, yet as desperately as Aniston wants to like them, she finds them just too morbid and weird. Soon she is panicked as it becomes increasingly clear that she's become inextricably involved with someone who hates his life even more than she does hers.

Holden turns out to be such a loose cannon on a small ship, that his presence becomes much more of a liability than a lover. There are a number of interesting twists that soon turn this dark comedy into a complicated drama and for the most part the film is executed quite effectively. There is an overriding "be careful what you wish for" message to The Good Girl and an a pretty good moral as Aniston's simple indiscretion snowballs out of control and begins to have all sorts of unpleasant and frightening consequences on the lives of everyone involved.