The Plot: Mirabelle Buttersfield (Danes) is a bored sales clerk looking for love, when she is unexpectedly presented with a choice between the wealthy but commitment-shy Ray (Martin) and the awkward but sincere Jeremy (Schwartzman).

"I sure hope someone totally unappealing would hit on me soon."

The Flax Take:
Relationships in movies are rarely totally realistic, but usually the problem is that they are too idealized.  Shopgirl has the opposite problem - its relationships are unbelievable largely because of how bad they are.  Based on the Steve Martin novella, Shopgirl takes its main character Mirabelle (Claire Danes) and presents her with two choices: bad and worse.  It's one thing for a film to suggest that you don't always end up in a perfect relationship; Shopgirl suggests that a horrible relationship is fine if you really want it to be, an appalling primer for couples everywhere.

One of the first problems with Shopgirl is Mirabelle herself; she's effectively a cipher, given very little in the way of significant character traits.  Indeed, the key aspect of her life is that she's lonely, one the film emphasizes early on as it pushes her into a one-afternoon stand with the wholly unappealing Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman), with whom she had recently had a date that would leave every other woman in the world saying, "Well, at least I got a bad-date story out of this."  Jeremy has literally no redeeming qualities that I was aware of, unless you count "being male."  And that's why Mirabelle brings him home.  Feminists have found their heroine!

Soon after, Jeremy skips town, then stars in a tedious subplot that serves no purpose other than to remind you of who he is so no one is confused at the end of the movie.  This leaves Mirabelle free to enter a relationship with the older, wealthy Ray Porter (Steve Martin), who is pretty much as creepily needy as Jeremy, but with the added bonus that he is able to play sugar daddy.  Mirabelle is interested in commitment, however, something that Ray considers himself unable to provide.  Despite this, and despite the fact that Ray cheats on her while out of town, Mirabelle sticks to him for a long time, apparently for no other reason than that she is lonely.

Shopgirl has shockingly little to say on the state of relationships.  If it's even remotely understandable why either of these men constitutes an acceptable suitor for Mirabelle, it's only because we know so little about her that there's no real justification for saying they're definitely not.  Maybe she's secretly a member of the Ku Klux Klan and deserves her horrible choice.  I'm guessing that's not what the movie wants us to think, though.  It wants us to think, "You know, sometimes relationships aren't perfect.  But people need people."  This might make sense if not for the fact that the film is set in Los Angeles.  You're telling me that in a city of four million people (and millions more if you include the suburbs), her best choices are these two creeps?  It's preposterous.  There's a big difference between "imperfect relationships" and "unrealistically terrible relationships," and Shopgirl spends most of its time on the far right of that particular spectrum.

All of this might not be so bad if the film weren't so insanely sincere, as though its principal dichotomy were perfectly reasonable.  The film's closing narration - delivered by Martin himself, a distractingly bad choice given that he plays one of the three main characters and is not speaking as that character when he narrates - is almost sickeningly straight-faced, especially given who she ends up with.  This movie's romance is so awful it's like George Lucas was hired to punch up any scene in which Mirabelle talks to either Ray or Jeremy, but we're supposed to buy (a) true love and (b) that this relationship is suddenly perfect.  If the thesis ever was that sometimes relationships aren't perfect and that's okay, the last scene does its best to undercut that.  Not that it matters.

Shopgirl is all but unwatchable from start to finish, a gruesome mixture of bizarrely unpleasant romance and inane subplots that add nothing to the discourse.   The actors are all capable, but the script they've been handed to work with is an utter disaster.  The characters lack any sympathy, which might not be such a bad thing if the film didn't push them on us so forcefully.  A dose of cod liver oil that thinks it tastes like candy, the only wisdom to come out of Shopgirl is something it's not even trying to argue: if this is what the dating scene is really like, you're better off trying something else.