A film about a bulimic with the surname “Ralph,” starring cis male writer-director John Early as the cis female title character, seems at the outset to be going for the cheap laugh, but Maddie’s Secret is, at heart, a film about taking things seriously when the reflex is to snicker – things like chronic illnesses, like eating disorders, which are primarily associated with women, or like the conventions of the female-skewing genres the film imitates, with its movie-of-the-week histrionics and melodramatic sheen.
Early plays Maddie, a recipe developer and web-video chef at a Bön Appétit Test Kitchen – like Condé Nast property with the copyright-evading name “Gourmaybe” with a very femme wholesome ditziness, but there’s no winking to the performance or to how she’s treated by the script or other characters. This is a film about dysmorphia, not dysphoria, but the air-quotes aspect of the performance is apt for a film concerned with Maddie’s rise as an influencer-content creator in a Los Angeles of designer workwear, therapy apps, and buzzy hipster comfort-food restaurants like a pizza place called Naughty Pie Nature, a place where everyone is a “storyteller.”
Get more Little White Lies
Maddie starts out as a dishwasher under a Shitty Media Man boss played by Conner O’Malley, whose eruptions of unfiltered rage and vulgarity (“We’ve got content to make!”) are their own kind of gendered performance. She works her way up to on-camera talent when her supportive hubby (Eric Rahill) films a viral video of her cooking and then enjoying an eggplant smashburger, both indulgent and healthy, elevated and casual, in keeping with what another character clocks as Maddie’s “no-makeup makeup look.” Maddie is a vegetarian, for “ethical reasons” which are obviously cover for a tense equilibrium with extreme elimination diets, and her history of purging makes its heavily foreshadowed return soon after one too many comments about her refreshingly “healthy” and “normal” body, and under pressure to embody her own lifestyle brand for the producers of a hot restaurant show called The Boar, which is scouting her for a consulting role. (Harris Meyersohn, a producer here and, like O’Malley, Rahill, and editor Danny Scharar, one of the geniuses behind Rap World, practically sweats Erewhon as one of The Boar’s showrunners.)
Maddie is both wholesome and controlled — one of her recipes might involve a purple potato, sliced so thin on the mandolin that the sunlight shines through it, casting a stained-glass light on her face. This is a Douglas Sirk effect, the stylization pushed to such an extreme of expressiveness that it’s too heightened to as anything but sarcastic, but also too passionate to take as anything but serious, and Early is one contemporary filmmaker – Todd Haynes is another – who sees the exquisite, manicured melodramas of Golden Age Hollywood as a useful template for the era of social media, in which every gesture is also a performance. The cast of Maddie’s Secret – particularly tomboyish Kate Berlant, as Maddie’s spiky and besotted sapphic sidekick – put an overenunciated gloss on every scene; Early and director of photography Max Lakner work in a deliberately overwrought visual language: a fast dolly-in for a dramatic line reading, a larger-than-life close-up of a food-smeared mouth or bloodshot eyes to signify Maddie’s secret shame. That Maddie is a domestic-goddess entrepreneur is also a throwback to the classic women’s picture – Claudette Colbert was a single mother turned pancake-mix magnate in the original Imitation of Life, and Mildred Pierce was a baker who became a restaurateur, the kitchen being a place where a woman could transcend traditional gender constraints by embodying them to the hilt.
Early pulls off his trickiest tonal balancing act when Maddie checks into an inpatient clinic full of adult women stuck in a permanent adolescence, particularly a characteristically avid Vanessa Bayer as Maddie’s roommate, with a teenybopper’s wall of pink posters and an obsessive crush on the prissy male nurse. There’s a deep well of suffering here, evident in the submission to a regimen of daily weigh-ins and the tentative gestures of solidarity, that isn’t compromised by the absurdist gags and knowing genre beats. For the most part, that is: Early is sincere enough that he eventually reverts to bald therapeutic language in search of catharsis; in another echo of mid-century Hollywood, it’s straightforwardly Freudian, coming back to Maddie’s mother (Kristen Johnston, in 80s-retro Madonna bangles that betray her mental age). This is disappointingly rote for a film that had courted such hoary conventions without either aping or parodying them, but maybe even that is sort of the point. After all, how many genuinely struggling people have second-guessed their own pain by saying something like, “God, I’m such a cliché”?
