James Corden really, really, really needs a new agent. His choice of scripts is getting out of hand. The Emoji Movie, Peter Rabbit, Cats, even the British dub of Norm Of The North; whatever potential he may have had in Hollywood, he has pissed away entirely by contributing to some of the absolute worst movies of the 2010s, and dragging down the few good ones he gets (like being the biggest sticking point in the otherwise-excellent Smallfoot). He is a walking warning flare for any movie he’s attached to, but his presence within those movies is only a symptom of much larger problems with those productions. And the same is true for this one, to the point where watching this brought something… ugly out of me.
Adapted from the Broadway musical of the same name, it’s the story of a high school girl (Jo Ellen Pellman’s Emma) who just wants to take her girlfriend (Ariana DeBose’s Alyssa) to the prom… except the PTA cancelled it so that wouldn’t happen. After the event makes headlines, a group of Broadway stars (Meryl Streep, Corden, Nicole Kidman, and Andrew Rannells) decide to take up her cause to clear up their own PR images. Cue literal song and dance about promoting tolerance and how queer kids have the right to be as happy (and as miserable) as everyone else.
A lot of the scenes involving the stars bank on musical irony to make their point, with them belting out numbers about how they’re totally not being opportunistic and that this all definitely isn’t an attempt to cover up their latent narcissism. As an attempt to demystify these kinds of sensationalist stories and how there’s real people at the heart of them, there’s certainly good intentions behind it… but as I’ve been making a habit of saying throughout 2020, good intentions don’t mean anything if the result isn’t there.
And here, because the direction and tone are so aggressively upbeat and bursting with Broadway energy, it’s difficult to buy into the heart behind all this. Like, at all. Watching the introductory number Changing Lives, I found it practically impossible not to see all this thinly-veiled tongue-in-cheek cynicism as an unintentional admission of the intentions of every person on that set: Lending brand power to a social cause, not because they actually give a shit about it, but just to boost their own profiles. It is Rainbow Washing: The Movie.
I hate thinking like this. I seriously can’t fucking stand people who approach media like this; in the same vein of how good intentions aren’t everything, even something created under the worst intentions possible can still be a good thing depending on how the result shapes out. I get that the cinema industry is and always will be a business first and foremost, and everything is ultimately made for the bottom line, but that doesn’t change the fact that messaging in media can be an incredibly powerful and empowering part of pop culture. Hell, part of this film’s text is about how musical theatre can offer a chance for the audience to escape the real world for a time and heal in a wash of glamour and bombast.
But that’s not what this film feels like in the moment. It won’t allow for that escape because of how incessantly it tries to parade its own wokeness and relevancy, to the point where getting into any of these musical numbers just… didn’t happen for me. I’m not as down about Meryl Streep as a singer as most others are, and for all the shit I give Corden, the man can perform under the right circumstances. Hell, I’ll even admit that Pellman makes a killer debut here, holding her own alongside anyone else she shares the screen with. But again, it all just slides off because I’m unable to look past the thick, sidewalk-in-the-summer-heat haze of bullshit baked into every facet of this narrative.
Showering with bricks would be less painful than sitting through this. Chemical castration doesn’t strip human dignity as readily as this does. Getting screamed at by funeral picketers isn’t this aggravating. Being pistol-whipped and tied to a fence would at least let me sleep through this nonsense. If any of this imagery sounds distasteful to you, understand that there’s a reason why I’m choosing these words to express how much I cannot stand this thing. For a movie based on a musical based on real-life discriminatory events, all puffed up to try and be something inspirational for queer kids going through the same shit, it is so miscalculated that it turns real activism into a fucking farce.
Even for the depths that 2020’s cinema managed to reach, this film represents something particularly foul within that bracket. It’s not just that I couldn’t get into it personally, and for those reading this who have seen it and liked it, good on you and I would never dream of getting between you and actually finding some joy in this dumpster fire of a year. It’s not even that I couldn’t get into the messaging, which is still relevant to this day. It’s that the extent to which I can’t get into this brings out a cynical attitude in me that, far as I’m concerned, is the biggest obstacle between not just a person and a piece of art, but a person and other persons. It turned me into the very thing I hate, and over 1200+ reviews on this blog, I can scarcely recall a film that left me that fucking miserable by the end of it.
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