This indie movie cant rather square its transformative weight-loss story with its empowering intents
“S o you’re identifying me as fat?” quips Brittany (Jillian Bell) to her physician. The 28-year-old is 5ft 6in, 13st 8lb and clinically obese. “I seem like you entirely missed out on the point of those Dove advertisements,” she drolly informs him. In writer-director Paul Downs Colaizzo’s indie funny, based upon among his buddies, Brittany is stimulated by this embarrassing encounter into getting fit and training for a marathon. She laces up her fitness instructors; the happily plus-size popstar Lizzo’s empowerment anthem Good as Hell plays over the occurring weight-loss montage. It’s a warning.
The movie has a hard time to square its lead character’s weight reduction with the pressure to provide a body-positive position and guarantee it does not push away the really female audience it courts. One minute it’s wryly satirizing the expenditure and inaccessibility of health clubs, the next it’s fetishistically cataloguing the diminishing number on Brittany’s scales. As her body changes, so does her life. She discovers a brand-new task, and encouraging pals in her running club; males start to discover her. Brittany still fights with her body concerns, not able to shed her identity as “a fat woman”. There’s a note of fact in Bell’s carefully tuned efficiency as a character whose insecurities have actually calcified for many years, solidifying her to authentic goodwill, which she often misreads as pity.
However, a feelgood fairy tale ending concludes Brittany’s story a little too nicely, with Colaizzo insistent on offering the audience a runner’s high.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/nov/03/brittany-runs-a-marathon-review-jillian-bell
