I’m fat. I’ve been fat for as long as I can remember. Which is why, I suspect, I tend to dread movies and TV shows that try to deal frankly with obesity. The sad fact is, so much of Hollywood is dominated by, well, fit white people that it’s tough to trust that they’re coming at the issue with any insight or honesty. I had high hopes for Brittany Runs a Marathon, Paul Downs Colaizzo’s 2019 dramedy, largely because it stars Jillian Bell, an actress I’ve found endlessly charming for some time now. Unfortunately, like so many stories from Hollywood, Brittany Runs a Marathon feels like a story about fat people, but by – and for – skinny people.
The story concerns Brittany, a hard-partying, overweight woman in her late-20s. Brittany goes to a cheap doctor hoping to score some Adderall, and ends up learning that she is overweight. (She somehow had not noticed, previously). From there, she takes up running, then joins a running group. She makes more supportive friends, with healthier goals. She starts replacing pizza with salads. She’s chasing a goal: To run in the New York City Marathon. Cue the typical inspirational sports film narrative, with some self-loathing millennial bite to give it flavor.
A Quick Personal Story
My mother, who has run many marathons in her life, is often concerned about my weight.
“Why don’t you just go to the gym?”
“Maybe you should take up running?”
“Have you considered just doing salads for lunch every day?”
On the one hand, I’m fat and she’s not, so I can see why she thinks she knows more about losing weight. But what she actually knows about is being fit. The skills required to change something and the skills required to maintain something are, well, different skills. She still doesn’t really get that, sometimes.
Just something that was on my mind as I watched.
Back to the ‘Review’
Look, I don’t hate the movie. Brittany Runs A Marathon has some good performances, particularly Jillian Bell’s acerbic clown, and every so often it stumbles into a genuinely powerful scene or insightful line. The one moment of the film that rang true for me came after an injury forced Brittany to stop running for six weeks. To some, this is a speed bump; to Brittany, it’s a catastrophe. Bell nails the rage and shame and disappointment, the certainty that all her work has been undone. For the next few minutes, Brittany basically blows up her entire life, so sure is she that this is the end.
And then she’s just… okay. Don’t get me wrong, it takes hitting a low point and getting an inspirational pep talk, but… she just gets back on track. Running was easy to start up the first time, and it’s just as easy this time.
That’s why I mentioned the inspirational sports film narratives above. Brittany Runs A Marathon is much less invested in finding a way to wrestle with the profoundly thorny issues it raises tying weight to health to self-love. It has much simpler aspirations. Brittany Runs A Marathon wants to be Miracle. It wants to be A League of Their Own. But despite a great cast and some powerful individual scenes, it lacks the empathy of a great inspirational story. It doesn’t understand the messy reality of the human body.
“Changing your life was never about your weight.”
The line above was spoken by Brittany’s surrogate father, Demetrius (Get Out‘s Lil Rel Howery), and it is the moment on which the entire film pivots, emotionally speaking. And yet… Brittany’s quest is started by a doctor who explicitly tells her to lose weight. The motivation behind nearly every story thread is her weight. If it was never about losing weight, why so many inspirational shots of her looking smaller?
Ultimately, the writer argues, Brittany just needed to love herself. If she just cared more, she’d start taking care of herself. Which implies, of course, that fat people don’t care about themselves. That fat people can’t run. Not in a malicious way; one shoe-horned in character from late in the film clarifies that being fat is fine, it’s just fine, as long as you love yourself. But, you know, they didn’t make a movie about that girl. They made a movie about Brittany. And it turns out it’s really easy to lose that weight when it’s just a fat suit you can take off in a feel-good montage.
Brittany Runs a Marathon was released in early 2019, and is now streaming on Amazon Prime. Written and directed by Paul Downs Colaizzo, Brittany Runs a Marathon stars Jillian Bell, Michaela Watkins, and Utkarsh Ambudkar.