Monday Movie Review: Brittany Runs a Marathon
Okay. Lots to digest with this one. I kind of have a love/hate relationship with it. But first, the basics. Brittany Runs a Marathon is about an overweight woman names Brittany (Jillian Bell) who goes to the doctor and is told she needs to lose weight. She can’t afford a gym membership because she has a crappy job and no career and lives in New York. So she decides to run since it’s free. She starts slowly and over time, makes some running friends and together they decide to run the New York City Marathon. They train, Brittany loses weight, she finds a new job, life is good. Until she finds out she has a hairline fracture in her calf and she can’t run in the marathon. She spirals, gets depressed when she sees her running friends finish the race, pulls herself back up, and runs the race the following year. Overall, there is nothing new or surprising about the story itself (inspired by a true story and written and directed by Paul Downs Colaizzo).
So. Some things I liked about the movie. In general, overall, if you take out some of the stuff I’ll get to in a second, I like the message of perseverance. Brittany sets out to do something and through a lot of hard work and training, she eventually accomplishes that goal. That’s a good message. I’m also on board with the idea of taking care of your body translating into taking better care of your mind. I think this is also a thing.
But I had A LOT of issues with this movie. First and foremost, it should be noted that this film could be majorly triggering for anyone who has ever felt fat-shamed. It happens throughout the movie, both clearly expressed and hinted at. The writer/director is a man, and a man who (based on his IMDB pic) is not overweight. Not to say he never has been, but judging by some of the choices made in this movie, he hasn’t ever been. The biggest thing for me is the constant focus on the numbers on the scale. The whole movie could have stayed the same, without consistent scale shots, and it would have been vastly improved. The stress placed on the numbers going down makes it seem like the only way to improve your life is to lose weight and THAT IS NOT TRUE. In fact, plenty of people train for a marathon and don’t lose any weight. It’s a thing. The other main component of this is watching Brittany’s life improve because she’s losing weight. She gets a better job, finds a boyfriend, has good sex, even has people hold the train for her, all because she drops some pounds. Again, had there not been scale shots every ten minutes, we could have figured her life was improving as she ran because her confidence was improving, or because her mental health was improving. All of these things can be reasons behind life improvements, they didn’t need to be attributed to losing weight.
After Brittany finds out she can’t run the marathon, she goes to her brother in law’s birthday party and, while drunk, says some truly heinous things to another female party guest who is overweight. Brittany eventually apologizes, and in the woman’s acceptance, she tells Brittany she thinks about her body and her weight every day. I would just like it to be made clear that not everyone who is overweight thinks about their weight every day. Brittany and her “best friend” also have a truly heinous blow out fight that made me pretty angry. I do not want to see females tearing each other down over their looks on my movie screens in 2019. Be better. There was NO NEED for this scene, and it was quite frankly, disgusting and incredibly unrealistic. Trust me, in my younger days, I said and did some truly horrible things to girls who were my closest friends, things I still regret twenty odd years later. But I have never come close to stooping to the levels of Brittany and her best friend. Ever. And I sure as hell would never talk to a woman like that at my current age (or in my twenties). It pisses me off because this is the kind of interaction we see between women all the time, screaming and yelling at each other and tearing each other down, and that so rarely happens in real life. Yet we’re primed to think at any moment that’s how our friends might treat us because that’s what we see on screen. And it’s not true. Women support women, and if you don’t believe me, go hang out in the bathroom of any club on a Saturday night.
In the hands of a woman, preferably an overweight woman, this film could have been truly powerful. But the shaming, offensive, insensitive moments completely drag it down, wiping out any goodwill that may have been created. This movie gets a D from me. So I guess it’s more of a hate/hate relationship *shrug*
