Lola Versus: old male critics and a whitewashed New York

Lola Versus is the story of Lola (Greta Gerwig), a PhD student, who gets engaged to her handsome boyfriend in their sun drenched NYC loft on her 29th year. All is going swimmingly until he dumps her three weeks before the wedding, just after she tries on the dress. The rest of the movie is basically her snotting on best friend Alice (Zoe Lister-Jones, who co wrote the script). She also hooks up with a few unsuitable guys, and tries to get her grove back after nine years of smug coupledom.

Before I lay into it, I do want to say I enjoyed the movie. I have an extremely high tolerance for millennial angst and Greta Gerwig (who is lovely as ever here). The focus is on the aftermath of a breakup, which is relatable and sets the movie apart from standard romantic comedy fare.

After snooping on some of the other reviews for the movie, I came across a smidgen of controversy around its release. Director Daryl Wien and Zoe Lister-Jones (real life couple and makers of Breaking Upwards) sent an email to supporters, blaming male critics for bad reviews and poor ticket sales: "The male critics are attacking the film and our box office really struggled last night. We think this has a lot to do with it being a female driven comedy about a single woman, and the older male critics don't like messy unapologetic stories with women at the center."

The email was leaked, and I'm pretty certain that the filmmakers are regretting their choice of words, as it lead many to call them a pair of sissies, and point out that their movie isn’t really that good.

I am going to defend them a little. Since I started this blog, I have often been surprised at how bad the reviews are for movies I cover. A common complaint is that they are boring, which is probably the most damning criticism any art form can face. But many male critics do seem to forget that these stories are relatable and subsequently interesting to many. It’s part of the reason I wanted to write more seriously about these types of movies, which often get a dismissive paragraph and two stars elsewhere.

Sadly this film flops in a couple of ways. Mainly, it’s not really that funny. There are some snarky one liners, and some gags that are laboriously set up and then never taken that far. It's enough for the odd smile, but never much more.

You also get the feeling that these are some serious first world problems being faced here. Don't get me wrong, I have all lot of time for slightly indulgent films about young people finding themselves, but do they always have to be bloody millionaires? Lola is a student, her ex is an artist, and yet their loft looks like an Air BnB commercial. Alice is an actress, Lola’s other buddy and sometime lover Henry is a bloody musician. They jam and jive in one the most expensive cities on earth, happily eating brunch on weekdays. It’s a little infuriating.

Another thing that seriously bugged me was the whitewashing of New York. Granted we see this all the time, with Girls and the like, but it's still shitty. At the end of the movie there is this little scene where the whole gang performs a rap, and the one black buddy Randy (Jay Pharoah) says "And I'm your friend who is black.” referencing the tokenistic casting.

Just as I was finishing up this review I found a fairly infuriating interview with the filmmakers on this topic:

Lister-Jones: I think what the rap was doing was shedding a little fact that it's still pretty homogenized! So we're aware.

Wein: Not to toot our own horn, but our professor in the school scene is black, too.

They seem to think that by joking about how few people of color are in the film, they have washed their hands of it. They also mentioned that they considered Zoe Saldana for the lead role because it would be interesting to have an African-American in the lead (Saldana is Latin-American). They explain their difficult position:

Wein: We try to sprinkle people around, but we as filmmakers are also up against a problem, a stigma in Hollywood at large, of having people of color and different ethnicities in lead roles.

Firstly, I don’t really like they idea of “sprinkling people around” as if they are hundreds of thousands on top of a vanilla cupcake. And while I’m sure there is a ton of racist red tape, if the filmmakers care about diversity then they also shoulder some of the responsibility for this film having barely any. The fact that they then go on to plug their new movie Motherfucker sort of negates the idea that these guys are really working towards easy commercial appeal.

It is a much wider issue, and I certainly can’t claim the other films I have reviewed here so far have explored much more than a very white experience (though I must try harder to rectify this). It’s important to call out the prejudices that make it hard for people of colour to get juicy roles. Even if their comments are annoyingly self-satisfied, Wein and Lister-Jones are at least discussing an issue that has been avoided by so many others. Still, it's hard to believe that the powers that be meant this little indie couldn’t have had more than one black actor with a couple of lines. If it is so, then we should be really, really mad about it.

First published on strongfemalelead.wordpress.com