This indie film can’t quite square its transformative weight-loss narrative with its empowering intentions
“So you’re diagnosing me as fat?” quips Brittany (Jillian Bell) to her doctor. The 28-year-old is 5ft 6in, 13st 8lb and medically overweight. “I feel like you completely missed the point of those Dove ads,” she drolly tells him. In writer-director Paul Downs Colaizzo’s indie
comedy, based on one of his friends, Brittany is spurred by this humiliating encounter into getting fit and training for a marathon. She laces up her trainers; the proudly plus-size popstar Lizzo’s empowerment anthem Good as Hell plays over the ensuing weight-loss montage. It’s a red flag.
The film struggles to square its protagonist’s weight loss with the pressure to present a body-positive position and ensure it doesn’t alienate the very female audience it courts. One minute it’s wryly poking fun at the expense and inaccessibility of gyms, the next it’s fetishistically cataloguing the shrinking number on Brittany’s scales. Indeed, as her body transforms, so does her life. She finds a new job, and supportive friends in her running club; men begin to notice her. Yet Brittany still battles with her body issues, unable to shed her identity as “a fat girl”. There’s a note of truth in Bell’s finely tuned performance as a character whose insecurities have calcified over the years, hardening her to genuine goodwill, which she frequently misreads as pity.