Wasteland, Texas

Thoreau's line about "the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation" could be applied to Justine Last, the lead character in The Good Girl, a low-budget morality play by writer Mike White and director Miguel Arteta, the same team that produced the creepy but moving Chuck and Buck.

Both films deal with loneliness and  desperate attempts to battle it. Chuck and Buck examines the obsessive way a grown man can hang onto the friendships of his past. The Good Girl shows how easy it is to stray from a boring, dead-end existence by having an illicit affair, and how difficult it is to regroup once the passion turns to need. ("Oh, what a tangled web we weave.") When Justine (Jennifer Aniston) breaks her wedding vows by getting it on in the storeroom and the local motel with Holden Worther (Jake Gyllenhaal), a younger (and disturbed) fellow employee at the Retail Rodeo, she is risking not only her marriage but her sense of who she is and how she fits into the grand scheme of things. At least in Texas.

Literary sleuths will be able to recognize the heights that White and Artera are aiming for in The Good Girl, a title which is both allegorical and oddly sexual. The name Justine refers to the 1957 novel by Lawrence Durrell (the first part of his Alexandria Quartet), an examination of modern love, and also to the scandalous 1791 novel by the Marquis de Sade. Holden refers to Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (a connection that is reinforced in the film itself), while the small Texas town where the story plays out is called Wasteland, a not-so-veiled reference to T. S. Eliot's  poem about souls in despair. This, on top of the Madame Bovary--influenced storyline, makes the film feel downright classical in its three-act structure.